|
|
They’re Watching: Homeland Security Tracking
Visitors Across Alternative News and Prepper Web
Sites
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t
mean they’re not out to get you.
If there ever existed individuals and groups that
threatened the status quo it’s now, and they can often be found
congregating at alternative news web sites, forums and preparedness oriented
online communities. Government officials at the Department of Homeland
Security and the FBI have done everything in their power to marginalize their
dangerous ideas and activities going so far as to even issue
security bulletins to
private businesses like banks, surplus stores, coffee shops and other
retailers outlining what employees should look for and when to say something
to law enforcement officials. Activities like putting a Ron Paul bumper
sticker on your car, paying cash, buying gold, stocking up on food, promoting
“anti-U.S.” and “radical theologies,” and demanding
personal privacy are all now considered to be suspicious in the eyes of a
government hell bent on destroying the Constitution.
While DHS has requisitioned the help of brick and
mortar businesses in their efforts to identify persons-of-interest, they have
realized that the best place to locate domestic threats to national security
is the internet. As such, they have deployed a host of tools to not only
monitor what is being posted online, but who is posting it, who their friends
are, which sites they visit and what information they ‘like’ in
particular.
A recent
report from well known survival author James Rawles
suggests that Preparedness oriented web sites are a prime target of
government snooping and sniffing. A web site like Rawles’
Survival Blog, or even our very own SHTFplan, undoubtedly meets all of the criteria outlined in
the multitude of security bulletins issued by DHS and FBI, thus it would only
make sense that these types of communities would be primary destinations for
government monitoring. In the case of Survival Blog, Rawles
reports that a recent analysis of his logs by web forensic experts yielded
some startling results:
It has
come to my attention that from August of 2011 to November of 2011, the FBI
secretly redirected the web traffic of more than 10% of SurvivalBlog’s
US visitors through CJIS, their
sprawling data center situated on 900 acres, 10 miles from Clarksburg, West
Virginia. There, the Feebees surreptitiously
collected the IP addresses of my site visitors. In all, 4,906 of 35,494
selected connections ended up going to or through the FBI servers. (Note that
this happened several months beforewe moved our
primary server to Sweden.) Furthermore, we discovered that
the FBI attached a long-lived cookie that
allowed them to track the sites that readers subsequently visited. I suspect
that the FBI has done the same to hundreds of other web sites. I find
this situation totally abhorrent, and contrary to the letter of 4th Amendment
as well as the intent of our
Founding Fathers.
I
recognize that I am making this announcement at the risk of losing some readers.So be it.
But I felt compelled to tell my readers immediately, because it was the
honorable and forthright course of action.
Working on
my behalf, some volunteer web forensics experts dissected some cached version
histories. (Just about everything is available on the Internet, and the
footprints and cookie crumb trails that you leave are essentially there for a
lifetime.) The volunteers found that the bulk of the FBI redirects were
selected because of a reader’s association with “Intellectual
Property” infringing sites like the now defunct Megaupload.
But once redirected, you were assigned a cookie. However, some of these were direct
connections to the SurvivalBlog site (around 4%
of the total.) So if they had kept this practice up long enough and if you
visited us enough times then the FBI’s computers would have given you a
cookie. This has been verified with sniffer software.
Most alarming about this is that according to James Rawles’ analysis, users’ browsers were first
redirected to an FBI server, then forced to download a cookie via their
browser, and were then redirected back to his web site – the entire
process unbeknownst to the end user because it happens almost instantly.
Because the cookie isn’t removed unless you clear it from your browser
(you can easily remove cookies
manually) every
web site subsequently visited by the user would then be logged by an FBI
computer in real-time.
You can be assured that if the FBI is engaging in
this type of surveillance, Survival Blog and other preparedness web sites
aren’t alone. Chances are that, as Rawles
mentions, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of web sites being tracked
and monitored in similar fashion. A report from
the Intel Hub confirms our suspicions, as do our
own visitor logs, and
we’d venture to guess that most other web sites in the alternative news
sphere will see similar access logs.
Perhaps for now the government surveillance net is
somewhat limited to specific internet spheres of interest, as their
surveillance infrastructure is still being constructed. But it won’t
be long, in fact less than 18 months, before they have the ability to track
every single phone call, text message, email, image and video upload, blog
post, comment, search query and social networking activity in the world. Yes,
that’s right, EVERY SINGLE digital interaction:
Via The Daily Crux:
Under construction by contractors with top-secret
clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the
National Security Agency.
A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece
in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to
intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s
communications, as they zap down from satellites and zip through the
underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic
networks.
As we highlighted in Everything
You Do Is Monitored, the government is rapidly taking steps across the nation’s
entire security apparatus and its ancillary arms such as major search
engines, private banks, telecommunications companies and social networks to
log, aggregate and analyze the behavior of individual users as well as groups
to which they belong. To what end is anybody’s guess (but we could, of
course, venture a
few theories).
It should be perfectly clear. Whether you’re a
prepper, alternative news buff, or none of the
above, the government wants to know what you’re doing. No one is immune
to the surveillance state.
We’re all suspects now.
They’re watching.
Resources: Here are some things you can do to
protect your privacy online:
-Anonymous
Web Surfing (Article)
-Set up a Virtual Private Network to protect your web surfing identity
-The TOR Project: Open source, free anonymous browsing
-Surf the internet from public wireless access points (Article)
|
|
