Ride the Lightning
Cybersecurity and Future of Law Practice Blog
by Sharon D. Nelson Esq., President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
NSA Spies on WikiLeaks – and Records its Visitors
February 20, 2014
It sure has been an NSA kind of week. But how can I not report on a BGR article this week which reveals that new documents linked by (three guesses and the first two don't count) Edward Snowden show that the NSA and the GCHQ (Britain's version of the NSA) have spied on Wikileaks for years, recording information about the people who accessed the site in the process, regardless of their citizenship.
For example, GCHQ was able to “secretly monitor visitors to a WikiLeaks site,” and “collect the IP addresses of visitors in real time, as well as the search terms that visitors used to reach the site from search engines like Google.
At one point, the NSA considered designating Wikileaks as “a ‘malicious foreign actor’ for the purpose of targeting” with such a designation allowing the agency to target the site “with extensive electronics surveillance – without the need to exclude U.S. persons from the surveillance searches.” I am not sure this was ever done, but it seems as though it must have happened in some manner if data on Americans was in fact collected. Similarly, in 2008, the U.S. Army identified WikiLeaks as an enemy, plotting “how it could be destroyed.” That's the Army – it loves to blow stuff up. If only Wikileaks could be destroyed by an Army drone . . .
It would appear that everyone interested in any Wikileaks revelations or cybersecurity generally has had their IP addresses recorded. The old saying, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not watching you" seems to be truer than ever.
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