Thread: It's not just Big Brother or the NSA watching you.

For every Big Brother or NSA snoop listening in on your irritating and bothersome political grumbling (their opinion) about the states not being protected from invasion by illegal aliens, there are numerous U.S. and international corporations and nongovernmental organizations, private investigators and insurance investigators, legal researchers and market researchers, database aggregators filling in the blanks and faceless surveyors breaking into your evening mealtime, even foreign spying operators if you happen to be a VIP in Washington, D.C. ...

especially if you have painted a target on your back by objecting to the ongoing foreign overtaking of elections and government, business and the markets, consumer choices and consumerism, medical choices and pharmaceutical payola, international oversight and management of the distribution channels of illegal narcotics and illicit prescription and recreational drugs, and even "enemies, both foreign and domestic," infiltrating, influencing, and exercising varying degrees of control over national defense policy and provision of military equipment and weaponry, and upon the U.S. military, through troop allocation and interactions with foreign sovereign nations, and recently, by way of influential, high-ranking officers being moved to less pivotal posts, relieved of command altogether, or involuntarily retired.

If those various privacy pryers are just trawling with huge nets for whatever comes up, it's not necessary that they even care about who you are or what you're doing, only that, somehow, they insinuate their monitoring devices between you and the Internet backbone. It's not as though there were any legitimate governing authority maintaining law and order on this murky frontier, where the government authorities are Public Enemy #1.

Their nets and tools (click to enlarge):

Originally Posted by Nicholas Weaver for Wired.com

Everything we’ve seen about QUANTUM and other internet activity can be replicated with a surprisingly moderate budget, using existing tools with just a little modification.

The biggest limitation on QUANTUM is location: The attacker must be able to see a request which identifies the target. Since the same techniques can work on a Wi-Fi network, a $50 Raspberry Pi, located in a Foggy Bottom Starbucks, can provide any country, big and small, with a little window of QUANTUM exploitation. A foreign government can perform the QUANTUM attack NSA-style wherever your traffic passes through their country.

And that’s the bottom line with the NSA’s QUANTUM program. The NSA does not have a monopoly on the technology, and their widespread use acts as implicit permission to others, both nation-state and criminal.

"A Close Look at the NSA’s Most Powerful Internet Attack Tool"
www.wired.com/opinion/2014/03/quantum