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Edward Snowden speaks via video link with participants of the MCI Alumni and Friends Conference at the Congress in Innsbruck on October 18, 2018 in Innsbruck, Austria.
There was a time when the idea that the US government could spy on your online activities could seem like a contrived conspiracy theory.
But that was before Edward Snowden. Back in 2013, Snowden, a former NSA defense contractor, shocked the world by talking about the extent to which American intelligence can conduct surveillance on the Internet and electronic communications. Snowden's revelations, published in the British Guardian and elsewhere, included the existence of a previously undisclosed NSA program called PRISM. The latter gave the NSA direct access to the servers of various major US Internet companies and allowed officials to collect information that included users' search histories, the content of their emails, file transfers, and even live chats.
Snowden's documents and information also revealed that the NSA had secretly hacked communications between data centers around the world, allowing him to download data on Internet communications - more than 180 million records in just one month - and store it at the agency's headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. The upstream surveillance program, as it was called, allows the NSA to track Americans' international online activity. The program gave the NSA the ability to scrutinize anyone who sends emails abroad or views a website hosted outside the United States.
Although two online surveillance programs are permitted by federal law that is designed to allow US intelligence agencies to spy on foreigners, the process also collects information about American activities. The revelations sparked protests, but Congress allowed both programs in January 2018.
But while the NSA collects a huge amount of data on online activity, this does not necessarily mean that it is spying on a huge number of ordinary Americans, which would be illegal. As explained in this question and the response of the Director of National Intelligence, before a search for data on the online activity of a foreign intelligence target can be conducted, a special secret court order is required to deal with such requests. There are also procedures requiring intelligence agencies to edit any messages from Americans that were accidentally captured during surveillance.
But the collection of your search history by NSA surveillance programs is not the only way the US government can access what you do on the Internet. We'll look at this in the next two sections.
FBI surveillance
The NSA is not the only federal agency that monitors the Internet. The FBI has been doing this for decades.
As detailed in a 2016 Wired article, the FBI initially began conducting online surveillance back in 1998 using a tool called Carnivore, which it installed on the backbones of the Internet network with the permission of service providers. This tool allowed agents to track the online communication of the person under investigation, filter and copy the metadata and content of the messages they sent and received. The existence of the Carnivore program became known in 2000 when the Internet provider refused to install it. By that time, it turned out, the bureau had only used the tool 25 times, which indicates widespread espionage. In 2005, the FBI replaced Carnivore with commercially available filtering software.
In addition, the FBI has other ways to find out what a person is doing on their computer. He can enter a car either remotely or by sneaking into someone's office and install key registration software that allows agents to track what the person is typing on the keyboard. This trick allows you to bypass encryption software designed to protect e-mail and other messages from interception.
The FBI has other tricks for revealing people who visit child pornography sites and other places where bad things happen. The bureau's own hackers can take control of servers and embed spyware on site pages, which in turn infects the computers of people accessing those pages.
These opportunities may sound daunting, but they are probably not something most law-abiding citizens will ever face, let alone worry about. In the next section, we'll take a look at the type of tracking you are most likely to come across.
Force ISPs to Save Your Information
In the mid-to-late 2000s, members of Congress twice introduced legislation called the Adult Exploitation of Young People's Exploitation Act Act, which required ISPs to retain “all records or other information related to the identity of a person - a user of a temporarily assigned network address that the service assigns to this user. " But the sponsors of the bill failed to get it passed.
Tracking web activity
There was a time, as strange as it may seem today, when Americans worried about the government introducing cookies, identifiers that websites put on your computer to recognize you. However, we do agree today that Google, Facebook and other private Internet companies collect vast amounts of information about us. So the threat of government cookies might not seem like a big deal.
But if you want to know what information the government may collect about you as a result of your visits to its websites, see the privacy and security policy article on the federal government services portal USA.gov for details. When you visit the site, it records your internet protocol address, a numeric code that identifies the router and the device you are using. It also records the website from which you went to USA.gov, the time and date of your visit, the searches you performed, and the links you followed. In addition, it even states if you are using Chrome or Firefox and what operating system is installed on your computer.
The government website also inserts cookies on your computer that identify you, but not by name. “We use web metrics services to track activity on USA.gov,” the site explains. "Government agencies only receive traffic statistics anonymously, and collectively, officials can track trends in website usage." The site also explains how you can turn off these so-called persistent cookies if you do not want to be tracked.
How Americans View Surveillance
Since the Snowden revelations, a poll by the Pew Research Center has shown that Americans are not as concerned about government surveillance of what they do on the Internet as you might suspect. Slightly more than half - 57 percent - felt it was inappropriate for the US government to monitor their citizens' communications, but only 39 percent said they were concerned that the government was tracking their Internet searches. Less than half - 49 percent - are concerned about the government's ability to protect their personal data.
