Glenn Greenwald: The NSA Can "Literally Watch Every Keystroke You Make"

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http://www.opednews.com/articles/Glenn-Greenwald-The-NSA-C-by-Democracy-Now-Glenn-Greenwald_Hackers_Malware_NSA-131231-17.html



Glenn Greenwald: The NSA Can "Literally Watch Every Keystroke You Make"
OpEdNews Op Eds 12/31/2013 at 15:51:14
By Democracy Now

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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman, as we continue our conversation about the National Security Agency. On Sunday, the German publication Der Spiegel revealed new details about secretive hacking -- a secretive hacking unit inside the NSA called the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO. The unit was created in 1997 to hack into global communications traffic. Still with us, Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU, director of the ACLU's Center for Democracy, and Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first broke the story about Edward Snowden. Glenn, can you just talk about the revelations in Der Spiegel?

GLENN GREENWALD: Sure. I think everybody knows by now, or at least I hope they do after the last seven months reporting, that the goal of the NSA really is the elimination of privacy worldwide -- not hyperbole, not metaphor, that's literally their goal, is to make sure that all human communications that take place electronically are collected and then stored by the NSA and susceptible to being monitored and analyzed. But the specifics are still really important to illustrate just the scope and invasiveness and the dangers presented by this secret surveillance system.

And what the Der Spiegel article details is that one of the things that the NSA is really adept at doing is implanting in various machines -- computers, laptops, even cellphones and the like -- malware. And malware is essentially a program that allows the NSA, in the terminology that hackers use, to own the machine. So, no matter how much encryption you use, no matter how much you safeguard your communication with passwords and other things, this malware allows the NSA to literally watch every keystroke that you make, to get screen captures of what it is that you're doing, to circumvent all forms of encryption and other barriers to your communications.

And one of the ways that they're doing it is that they intercept products in transit, such as if you order a laptop or other forms of Internet routers or servers and the like, they intercept it in transit, open the box, implant the malware, factory -- seal it and then send it back to the user. They also exploit weaknesses in Google and YouTube and Yahoo and other services, as well, in order to implant these devices. It's unclear to what extent, if at all, the companies even know about it, let alone cooperate in it. But what is clear is that they've been able to compromise the physical machines themselves, so that it makes no difference what precautions you take in terms of safeguarding the sanctity of your online activity.

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1. A little bit of a KICK. n/t