They’re Watching: Homeland Security Tracking Visitors Across Alternative News and Prepper Web Sites

[Eugen Leitl]

http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/theyre-watching-homeland-security-tracking-visitors-across-alternative-news-and-prepper-web-sites_03212012

Theybre Watching: Homeland Security Tracking Visitors Across Alternative News
and Prepper Web Sites

Mac Slavo

March 21st, 2012

SHTFplan.com

Comments (139)
	
Just because youbre paranoid doesnbt mean theybre not out to get you.

If there ever existed individuals and groups that threatened the status quo
itbs now, and they can often be found congregating at alternative news web
sites, forums and preparedness oriented online communities. Government
officials at the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI have done
everything in their power to marginalize their dangerous ideas and activities
going so far as to even issue security bulletins to private businesses like
banks, surplus stores, coffee shops and other retailers outlining what
employees should look for and when to say something to law enforcement
officials. Activities like putting a Ron Paul bumper sticker on your car,
paying cash, buying gold, stocking up on food, promoting banti-U.S.b and
bradical theologies,b and demanding personal privacy are all now considered
to be suspicious in the eyes of a government hell bent on destroying the
Constitution.

While DHS has requisitioned the help of brick and mortar businesses in their
efforts to identify persons-of-interest, they have realized that the best
place to locate domestic threats to national security is the internet. As
such, they have deployed a host of tools to not only monitor what is being
posted online, but who is posting it, who their friends are, which sites they
visit and what information they blikeb in particular.

A recent report from well known survival author James Rawles suggests that
Preparedness oriented web sites are a prime target of government snooping and
sniffing. A web site like Rawlesb Survival Blog, or even our very own
SHTFplan, undoubtedly meets all of the criteria outlined in the multitude of
security bulletins issued by DHS and FBI, thus it would only make sense that
these types of communities would be primary destinations for government
monitoring. In the case of Survival Blog, Rawles reports that a recent
analysis of his logs by web forensic experts yielded some startling results:

    It has come to my attention that from August of 2011 to November of 2011,
the FBI secretly redirected the web traffic of more than 10% of
SurvivalBlogbs US visitors through CJIS, their sprawling data center situated
on 900 acres, 10 miles from Clarksburg, West Virginia. There, the Feebees
surreptitiously collected the IP addresses of my site visitors. In all, 4,906
of 35,494 selected connections ended up going to or through the FBI servers.
(Note that this happened several months beforewe moved our primary server to
Sweden.) Furthermore, we discovered that the FBI attached a long-lived cookie
that allowed them to track the sites that readers subsequently visited. I
suspect that the FBI has done the same to hundreds of other web sites. I find
this situation totally abhorrent, and contrary to the letter of 4th Amendment
as well as the intent of our Founding Fathers.

    I recognize that I am making this announcement at the risk of losing some
readers.So be it. But I felt compelled to tell my readers immediately,
because it was the honorable and forthright course of action.

    Working on my behalf, some volunteer web forensics experts dissected some
cached version histories. (Just about everything is available on the
Internet, and the footprints and cookie crumb trails that you leave are
essentially there for a lifetime.) The volunteers found that the bulk of the
FBI redirects were selected because of a readerbs association with
bIntellectual Propertyb infringing sites like the now defunct Megaupload.
But once redirected, you were assigned a cookie.  However, some of these were
direct connections to the SurvivalBlog site (around 4% of the total.) So if
they had kept this practice up long enough and if you visited us enough times
then the FBIbs computers would have given you a cookie. This has been
verified with sniffer software.

Most alarming about this is that according to James Rawlesb analysis, usersb
browsers were first redirected to an FBI server, then forced to download a
cookie via their browser, and were then redirected back to his web site b the
entire process unbeknownst to the end user because it happens almost
instantly. Because the cookie isnbt removed unless you clear it from your
browser (you can easily remove cookies manually) every web site subsequently
visited by the user would then be logged by an FBI computer in real-time.

You can be assured that if the FBI is engaging in this type of surveillance,
Survival Blog and other preparedness web sites arenbt alone. Chances are
that, as Rawles mentions, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of web sites
being tracked and monitored in similar fashion. A report from the Intel Hub
confirms our suspicions, as do our own visitor logs, and webd venture to
guess that most other web sites in the alternative news sphere will see
similar access logs.

Perhaps for now the government surveillance net is somewhat limited to
specific internet spheres of interest, as their surveillance infrastructure
is still being constructed. But it wonbt be long, in fact less than 18
months, before they have the ability to track every single phone call, text
message, email, image and video upload, blog post, comment, search query and
social networking activity in the world. Yes, thatbs right, EVERY SINGLE
digital interaction:

    Via The Daily Crux:

    Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly
named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency.

    A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle
assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze,
and store vast swaths of the worldbs communications, as they zap down from
satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of
international, foreign, and domestic networks.

As we highlighted in Everything You Do Is Monitored, the government is
rapidly taking steps across the nationbs entire security apparatus and its
ancillary arms such as major search engines, private banks,
telecommunications companies and social networks to log, aggregate and
analyze the behavior of individual users as well as groups to which they
belong. To what end is anybodybs guess (but we could, of course, venture a
few theories).

It should be perfectly clear. Whether youbre a prepper, alternative news
buff, or none of the above, the government wants to know what youbre doing.
No one is immune to the surveillance state.

Webre all suspects now.

Theybre watching.

Resources: Here are some things you can do to protect your privacy online:

-Anonymous Web Surfing (Article)

-Set up a Virtual Private Network to protect your web surfing identity

-The TOR Project: Open source, free anonymous browsing

-Surf the internet from public wireless access points (Article) 

Author: Mac Slavo Date: March 21st, 2012 Website: www.SHTFplan.com

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