This morning a partial analysis of the NSA’s XKEYSCORE code was published in Germany. Jacob Applebaum, an evangelist for the The Onion Project (TOR), was one of the authors.
The report details specific rules written for one of the NSA’s data collection tools, XKEYSCORE, which collects the IP addresses of TOR bridges, and users of the TOR network.
TOR is an anonymizing service used by many human rights activists and dissidents around the world to access the Internet and escape persecution from their governments, like China. It is also reportedly highly targeted by the NSA.
One of the amazing offshoots of today’s story is that first Cory Doctorow speculated that the revealed source code came from a second leaker, not Snowden:
“Another expert said that s/he believed that this leak may come from a second source, not Edward Snowden, as s/he had not seen this in the original Snowden docs; and had seen other revelations that also appeared independent of the Snowden materials. If that’s true, it’s big news, as Snowden was the first person to ever leak docs from the NSA. The existence of a potential second source means that Snowden may have inspired some of his former colleagues to take a long, hard look at the agency’s cavalier attitude to the law and decency.”
Bron