UNPEELING THE ONION BROWSER
They’re watching you. They’re watching everything you do online. You’d think we were being paranoid, but it’s part of their mission statement; the international Five Eyes (https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes) is a group made up of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, which have worked together since World War II to collate and share intelligence – and that includes internet use by you.
In the digital age, that means intercepting, storing, and analysing all internet traffic. Don’t be fooled into thinking that local laws can stop a nation state from spying on its own citizens. If you’re one of the Five Eyes, just get your mates overseas to do the spying, then report back. Tempora (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora), a UK programme, splices off the undersea fibre-optic backbone of the internet, duplicates all the data transmitted over it. The data is then shared with the USA's NSA. Damn crafty us Brits, described by Edward Snowden as “worse than the US.”
In the USA, programmes such as PRISM created a legal framework for the NSA to spy on targeted US citizens, immunising co-operating US companies from prosecution. Or take MUSCULAR for bulk copying Google and Yahoo! data to outside US territory, for the NSA and the UK's GCHQ to rifle through at their leisure. And who knows what Russia, North Korea, and China are up to.
It’s not paranoia.
