Ars tests Internet surveillance—by spying on an NPR reporter
A week spent playing NSA reveals just how much data we leak online.
On a bright April morning in Menlo Park, California, I became an Internet spy.
This was easier than it sounds because I had a willing target. I had partnered with National Public Radio (NPR) tech correspondent Steve Henn for an experiment in Internet surveillance. For one week, while Henn researched a story, he allowed himself to be watched—acting as a stand-in, in effect, for everyone who uses Internet-connected devices. How much of our lives do we really reveal simply by going online?
Henn let me into his Silicon Valley home and ushered me into his office with a cup of coffee. Waiting for me there was the key tool of my new trade: a metal-and-plastic box that resembled nothing more threatening than an unlabeled Wi-Fi router. This was the PwnPlug R2, a piece of professional penetration testing gear designed by Pwnie Express CTO Dave Porcello and his team and on loan to us for this project.
(NPR’s Steve Henn in his home office and studio, with the Pwnie Express PwnPlug R2 that collected his Internet traffic for a week.)
The box would soon sink its teeth into the Internet traffic from Henn’s home computer and smartphone, silently gobbling up every morsel of data and spitting it surreptitiously out of Henn’s home network for our later analysis. With its help, we would create a pint-sized version of the Internet surveillance infrastructure used by the National Security Agency. Henn would serve as a proxy for Internet users, Porcello would become our one-man equivalent of the NSA’s Special Source Operations department, and I would become Henn’s personal NSA analyst…
SOURCE: ARSTECHNICA
I sincerely hope that the NSA eavesdroppers become irritated when listening to Aussie conversations which contain many slang words.
For instance, being ‘sprung’ with a ‘stiffie’ and a ‘snag’ does not mean throwing a body in a river which becomes tangled on a semi-submerged tree branch.
It means a man visits a friends house which he tells his wife is only for a few minutes, but after an extended period of time she goes to the friends house and catches (sprung) her husband in the yard with a few men, beside a BBQ with a glass of whisky (a stiff drink, a stiffie) in one hand and a sausage (snag) in the other hand.