In many ways, this article is more important to the inside baseball of the NSA policy debate rather than public understanding of the NSA program.
The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board has found the section 702 program to be reasonable in its tradeoffs between 4th Amendment guarantees to American citizens, global privacy rights, and national security gains.
The Section 702 program appears to work by either analysts or tech support personnel entering selectors into XkeyScore and similar systems(The Upstream Program) that look at network packet flows. Analysts are expected to justify even thinly that a selector is "foreign".
The data returned from a selector is both returned to the requestor and moved into a long term archive accessible by many NSA personnel.
So we believe from Jacob Applebaum's reporting that visits to https://www.torproject.org/ are tagged as valid selectors in Xkeyscore. It is indicated that these selectors are re-tasked so that once your identity is tagged your selectors are logged across the network.
We have independent corroboration that Tor and Tails are recommended tools among groups that threaten national security. The question is it worth the cost to have the journalists, human rights worker and technologists who also depend on these tools in the NSA long term archive?
The main takeaways of Barton Gellman's article are
1. NSA tech support personnel have unaudited access to XkeyScore selectors and the raw take. Numerous officials have testified to the contrary. This expands the potential for misuse.
2. The minimization process is not terribly robust. There is an enormous amount of constitutionally protected communication in the NSA full content database.
The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board has found the section 702 program to be reasonable in its tradeoffs between 4th Amendment guarantees to American citizens, global privacy rights, and national security gains.
The Section 702 program appears to work by either analysts or tech support personnel entering selectors into XkeyScore and similar systems(The Upstream Program) that look at network packet flows. Analysts are expected to justify even thinly that a selector is "foreign".
The data returned from a selector is both returned to the requestor and moved into a long term archive accessible by many NSA personnel.
So we believe from Jacob Applebaum's reporting that visits to https://www.torproject.org/ are tagged as valid selectors in Xkeyscore. It is indicated that these selectors are re-tasked so that once your identity is tagged your selectors are logged across the network.
We have independent corroboration that Tor and Tails are recommended tools among groups that threaten national security. The question is it worth the cost to have the journalists, human rights worker and technologists who also depend on these tools in the NSA long term archive?
The main takeaways of Barton Gellman's article are
1. NSA tech support personnel have unaudited access to XkeyScore selectors and the raw take. Numerous officials have testified to the contrary. This expands the potential for misuse.
2. The minimization process is not terribly robust. There is an enormous amount of constitutionally protected communication in the NSA full content database.