Ars Tests Internet Surveillance—By Spying on an NPR Reporter
June 11th, 2014If you are a non technical computer user, this article does a good job of explaining how much of your online life is like an open book for any man-in-the-middle observer. This observer could be your ISP, an intelligence organization, the police, anyone who has access to the network infrastructure between you and the Internet.
Tor is good for thwarting this type of surveillance if the observer is not an intelligence agency. If the observer is an intelligence agency, I have far less confidence in Tor (circa 2007).
Via: Ars Technica:
Our experiment would answer the question: could a passive observer of Internet traffic still learn much about a target in this post-Snowden world?
Henn dialed up Porcello and put him on speakerphone as we finalized the location and setup of the PwnPlug. As I snapped in an Ethernet cable, Henn turned on his iPhone and connected to the PwnPlug’s Wi-Fi network. Porcello watched remotely as data from Henn’s network suddenly poured into a specially configured Pwnie Express server.
“Whoa,” Porcello said. “Yep, there’s Yahoo, NPR… there’s an HTTP request to Google… the phone is checking for an update. Wow, there’s a lot of stuff going on here. It’s just thousands and thousands of pages of stuff… Are you sure you’re not opening any apps?”
“I didn’t do anything!” Henn replied. “My phone is just sitting here on my desk.”
He checked his phone and found that Mail, Notes, Safari, Maps, Calendar, Messages, Twitter, and Facebook were running in the background—and making connections to the Internet. The Safari Web browser proved the most revealing. Like most people who use the iPhone, Henn had left open dozens of websites; when his phone had connected to the PwnPlug’s network, the browser had refreshed them, revealing movies he was checking out for his kids, a weather report, and research he was doing for work.
In the first two minutes of our test, we had already captured a snapshot of Henn’s recent online life—and the real surveillance hadn’t even begun.
