I know this isn't breaking news and I'm sure those of us who are aware of and use TOR have been all but positive this was going on, but I just found an article from July and, well, I don't know what to say. I know what I'd like to say but I'm low man on the totem pole and don't want to run afoul of the CoC. Needless to say, this is more than a little disturbing, frustrating, and more. I see "fair use" posted around here a lot but I'm not going to paste the whole article. It's worth hitting for the whole 5 pages though. NSA targets the privacy-conscious (Seite 1)| Das Erste - Panorama - Meldungen NSA targets the privacy-conscious von J. Appelbaum, A. Gibson, J. Goetz, V. Kabisch, L. Kampf, L. Ryge The investigation discloses the following: Two servers in Germany - in Berlin and Nuremberg - are under surveillance by the NSA. Merely searching the web for the privacy-enhancing software tools outlined in the XKeyscore rules causes the NSA to mark and track the IP address of the person doing the search. Not only are German privacy software users tracked, but the source code shows that privacy software users worldwide are tracked by the NSA. Among the NSA's targets is the Tor network funded primarily by the US government to aid democracy advocates in authoritarian states. The XKeyscore rules reveal that the NSA tracks all connections to a server that hosts part of an anonymous email service at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It also records details about visits to a popular internet journal for Linux operating system users called "the Linux Journal - the Original Magazine of the Linux Community", and calls it an "extremist forum".
Our government is an "extremist forum"........... of jack-booted tyrannical thugs trampling on the rights of it citizens everyday...in every way!!
Their unofficial motto has always been, "In God We Trust. All others, We Monitor." If they had God's frequency, they'd monitor that too. It's how they do what they do, and they do way more good than harm. Sadly, you never hear of the good that they do. They only get bad press.