Isn't most information passing through internet encrypted? Be it strongly or not... amazing, so they can intercept that...
Encryption online is fairly rare. Unless you are on a site that uses https then you are transmitting in the clear. With the obvious exception of brief point-to-point encryption, like wifi WPA2, which just prevents interception at certain points while leaving others - such as the switches
commonly used for law enforcement intercepts- open. A few non-web services do use encryption, but not many and they tend to be the more paranoid services.
The EFF have been calling for more people to generally encrypt everything and use plugins like
https everywhere - which is well worth installing by the way - but as a rule people just don't bother. Which is a problem for everyone. When encryption is rare only those with something to hide bother, and so you can find those who are hiding something by looking for those who use encryption. If you encrypt everything by habit then it's less obvious when you actually start doing something that needs that extra level of security.
As a rule, treat anything you do online as screaming in the middle of a high street in front of traffic and news cameras. If you want anything to be private then you have to take steps.
As for the new leaks I've only skimmed the document so far but after the initial leaks I'm not exactly trusting of the Guardian's reading of them. So far they look pretty much like the set of legal requirements for identification of targets and minimisation of invalid data you would expect. The provisions they highlight are a lot more narrow than they make out or make sense from a technical point of view.
For example, the Guardian lists encrypted data among those types that the NSA can keep even if it has identifying information. This is for
decryption purposes. If I'm doing any sort of decryption then I want as much data as I can get. Even if I get the cypher text to the point where I can tell some of it is data about citizens (or there is metadata indicating such) I will want to keep it to help break the encryption method. But far more likely is just not being able to tell if it holds identifying information until I've broken the encryption, at which point minimisation requirements will kick in.
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Topic: NSA Leaks - GHCQ in court for violation of human rights (Read 105344 times)