stop Them Spying!

A great tentacled surveillance regime is reaching right into your business. Jonni Bidwell reveals how to yank it out!

A tentacled surveillance regime is slipping right into your business. Jonni Bidwell reveals how to yank it all out on

“Through technology we can thwart some of the indiscriminate surveillance”

Back in 2003 in a small room in a San Francisco AT&T office, Internet traffic was covertly being siphoned off from fibre optic trunk circuits, fed to a (then) state-of -the-art Narus Semantic Traffic Analyzer, and then, it’s widely accepted, forwarded to the NSA.

Access to the legendary room 641A, and others like it in other offices across the US, was highly restricted, so few employees knew anything about it besides its official “SG3 Secure Room” designation. But technician Mark Klein, using a combination of cable maps, equipment lists and water cooler banter, deduced this was part of the surveillance apparatus enacted by the Bush administration’s Patriot act.

Mark didn’t speak publicly about it until 2005, and joined the EFF’s legal action against AT&T. They and other telcos were granted retroactive immunity in 2008 via the FISA amendments act. Undeterred, the EFF launched a new lawsuit that year, Jewel vs the NSA, which is still ongoing.

Spies have spied on people since time immemorial. But things have come a long way since the cabinets noires of the 17th century. We learned just how far that was when Edward Snowden revealed the scope of NSA, GCHQ and other intelligence agencies’ around the world, spying in 2013. Through a series of PowerPoint slides, we learned of oddly titled programs – Bullrun, Prism, Echelon – in which cables were tapped, websites hacked, traffic redirected and ultimately millions of innocent people were surveilled. GCHQ lawyers even admitted that the total number of individuals targeted by its Tempora program “would be an infinite list which we couldn’t manage”.

Nation states are powerful things, and if one takes an interest in you it’s all but certain they could defeat any efforts you make to stay private. Fortunately, through technology and operational security we can thwart some of the indiscriminate surveillance, and maintain some degree of privacy and security.