Purpose: KARMA POLICE is a mass surveillance programme that collects web-browsing habits from “every visible user on the Internet”. It is used to create profiles that show the web browsing histories of people who browse the Internet unencrypted (e.g. without the use of Virtual Private Network or services such as…
Purpose: Anonymous remailers can be used to hide information about the sender of email by re-sending the email through a series of nodes that are connected in a chain thus hiding the originating location. The aim of remailers is to protect the anonymity of people who may find themselves in…
Purpose: Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) and GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) are both public key encryption cryptographic software used to authenticate the identity of people sending messages and to encrypt and decrypt email messages and documents. The key difference between the two is that PGP is paid-license software owned by Symantec….
Purpose: Off-the-Record Messaging (OTR) is an encryption protocol making it possible to engage in private conversations using specific instant messaging software. Its aim is to provide a platform that enables both encrypted and ‘deniable’ instant messaging conversations [CPU02]. ‘Deniable authentication’ allows participants in an instant messaging conversation to verify each…
Purpose: New types of encryption software are being developed that aim to address the vulnerabilities associated with traditional forms of encryption such as Public Key Encryption. At issue with traditional methods are traceability of authorship through the use of digital signatures (no true anonymity) and the decryption of messages and…
Purpose: There are options for preserving privacy and security that do not rely upon cryptographic technologies. Rather some people choose a selection of workarounds for communicating sensitive information. Techniques The most well known techniques include: Pseudonyms – a fictitious name used in place of a person’s real name to mask…
Purpose: A Virtual Private Network (VPN) network provides secure access to online data by creating a private network with which to access both the public Internet and other internal organisational networks. A VPN uses tunneling protocols thus encrypted data at the sending end and decrypted at the receiving end. VPNs…
Purpose: The Invisible Internet Project (I2P) is an anonymous peer-to-peer communication layer, an offshoot of Freenet (GIZ01) designed to run any Internet service (email, IRC, file sharing, HTTP, Telnet) as well as distributed applications. Its aim is to “protect communication from dragnet surveillance and monitoring by third parties such as…
Purpose: PRISM is an NSA programme that exploits data collected by the FBI’s Data Intercept Technology Unit (DITU) from nine major US corporations including Facebook, Google and Apple. There is no single PRISM database. Rather, when the data arrives at the NSA, it is sorted and distributed to the following…
Purpose: XKEYSCORE is an NSA search and analysis system for data collected by other surveillance programmes. The system is described by Snowden as a search engine that provides a “one-stop shop” for access to content, metadata and real-time tracking and monitoring of user activities (COU01). Access to XKEYSCORE is shared…
