NSA and surveillance of DNS

[Milton L Mueller]

There is a new paper out based on the Snowden revelations about how the  NSA uses DNS queries for surveillance.
I haven't read it yet, am in the process of doing so, but wanted to send this out for those of you who would also be interested before I forget.
https://gnunet.org/sites/default/files/mcb-en.pdf

"[In] a new set of top secret documents seen by Heise, it is revealed that the MORECOWBELL (MCB) program of the American spy agency NSA monitors DNS as a source of information about the Internet (Figure 2). NSA's MORECOWBELL program uses a dedicated covert monitoring infrastructure to actively query DNS servers
and perform HTTP requests to obtain meta information about services and to check their availability (Figure 1)."

This could just be automated collection of internet data of the sort that we academics and network operators engage in routinely, only the NSA is doing it - again, have to see.

Milton L Mueller
Laura J. and L. Douglas Meredith Professor
Syracuse University School of Information Studies
http://faculty.ischool.syr.edu/mueller/
Internet Governance Project
http://internetgovernance.org<http://internetgovernance.org/>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ncsg.is/pipermail/ncsg-discuss/attachments/20150124/d19d3f4c/attachment.htm>