Leaked documents posted by Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Gallagher hint at the discussions that took place around online actors like WikiLeaks, The Pirate Bay, and Anonymous, as well as the standards for spying on foreign and domestic internet users. At The Intercept, Greenwald and Gallagher have revealed details about when the NSA and agencies abroad believe it’s acceptable to target a person or site without “defeats” or measures to prevent collecting American information, with an eye towards groups that have proved a thorn in the side of government agencies.

Julian Assange appears in national security ‘Manhunting Timeline’

“Can we treat a foreign server who stores, or potentially disseminates leaked or stolen US data on it’s [sic] server as a ‘malicious foreign actor’ for the purpose of targeting with no defeats? Examples: WikiLeaks, thepiratebay.org, etc.” says one of several frequently asked questions apparently posted to an intelligence wiki for the US and other nations in the Five Eyes surveillance partnership. “Let us get back to you,” said a response from the NSA/CSS [Central Security Service] Threat Operation Center and the NSA’s Office of General Counsel. Another question asks whether it’s legal to target members of Anonymous who operate outside the US. “As long as they are foreign individuals outside of the US and do not hold dual citizenship… then you are okay,” came the answer. Agencies were not, however, apparently allowed to store copies of classified documents leaked by Anonymous or other groups in order to analyze the data.

WikiLeaks in particular came under fire. In addition to these questions, The Intercept leaked parts of a “Manhunting Timeline” that details where and how the US government is attempting to find, capture, or kill terrorists, drug traffickers, and others. This timeline apparently included information on Julian Assange, including attempts to pressure foreign governments into taking legal action against him and “the human network that supports WikiLeaks.” None of this comes as a surprise — the government’s attempts to get governments to put pressure on Assange is well known. Likewise, Anonymous has allegedly compromised government computers, and it’s not strange that the NSA wants to monitor it. The question of treating leaked document repositories as malicious foreign actors is thornier, playing into much larger debates over whether non-traditional journalism should be given the same protection as older outlets like The New York Times.

“If you ‘guess’ foreign and it’s not, then it is a serious violation.”

More generally, the document shows a complicated dance between minimizing US data collection and casting an expansive net over foreign surveillance. According to the FAQ, it’s legal to monitor foreign servers that Americans visit (The Pirate Bay is cited again) so long as agents attempt to filter out US information. The same goes for botnets that are operated from hacked US computers by a foreign source. As before, the document points to a fairly low standard for being certain that a target is foreign: 51 percent. A more complicated question is how agents are allowed to search traffic from US-based web giants like Gmail and Twitter. If an agency knows that a foreign potential threat is using one of these sites, it’s theoretically possible to look for traffic from it. But “if you ‘guess’ foreign and it’s not, then it is a serious violation.” In general, though, accidentally making queries a US person who was believed to be foreign was “nothing to worry about,” although it had to be logged for the Office of General Counsel.

The revelations here are far less conclusive than many of the leaked documents published so far. One slide apparently from an expanded version of this GCHQ document shows an analytics page that seems to monitor visits to WikiLeaks, including which countries visitors came from and how they found the site. But it’s not clear whether this is an ongoing program or a proof of concept test, especially given how few visits appear to be logged. The results are also broadly similar to what someone would get from a basic analytics page, not detailed user information. This slideshow and the FAQ do, however, give us a look into how the NSA and other agencies view online spycraft, both inside and outside the US.

By Adi Robertson on February 18, 2014 10:36 am

Find this story at 18 February 2014

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