New leaked documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal that the NSA authorized the monitoring of torrent sites including "malicious foreign actor" The Pirate Bay. The internal discussions further indicate that tracking people through multiple proxies is possible and suggest that once a release is made on Pirate Bay it's possible to go back over old traffic to see where it originated from.

The revelations of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden have caused shockwaves around the world and resonated in all corners of the online community. Today the leaked material is of particular interest to torrent site users.

Published on Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept, the new papers reveal internal NSA discussions over what can and cannot be monitored in various circumstances.

In Q&A‘s between NSA staff, Threat Operations Center Oversight and Compliance (NOC), and the NSA’s Office of General Council (OGC), torrent sites are mentioned on a number of occasions, with The Pirate Bay sitting front and center.

Tracking The Pirate Bay and its users

The first question concerns the querying of non US-based IP addresses which have been obtained from home soil.

“If we run across foreign malicious actors at home (spam email, router/IDS logs, torrent sites, etc) can we bring those IPs here and use the SIGINT [intelligence-gathering by interception] system to monitor these guys?” the member of staff asked.

“It might be okay,” NOC and OGC responded, “but wait for confirmation.”

The second instance came from a staff member asking questions over the monitoring of servers overseas, alongside the possibility that U.S. citizens may be using them.

“Is it okay to query against a foreign server known to be malicious even if there is a possibility that a US person could be using it as well? Example, thepiratebay.org,” the NSA employee wrote.

No problem, came the reply, but exercise caution.

“Okay to go after foreign servers which US people use also (with no defeats). But try to minimize to ‘post’ only, for example, to filter out non-pertinent information,” NOC and OGC wrote back.

From the documents it’s clear that the NSA sees both The Pirate Bay and Wikileaks as organizations that threaten U.S. security through their distribution of U.S. secrets. What follows is a question which seems to suggests that once a torrent has been released on The Pirate Bay, it’s possible to analyze traffic sent before the release was made in order to trace the leaker.

“[If a] list of .mil passwords [were] released to thepiratebay.org…can we go back into XKS-SIGINT (using a custom created fingerprint) to search for all traffic containing that password in foreign traffic just before the release? the NSA worker asked.

Tracking people using proxies to hide their activities

While many consider proxies as useful tools to mask their online activities, it has to be presumed that organizations such as the NSA have the ability to track individuals using even multiple instances. The next set of questions skip over the mechanics of how that might be possible (with the clear implication that it is) and jump straight to what is permissible.

[When an actor is]….posting to thepiratebay.org (a foreign web-server)….through multiple proxied hops, are we allowed to back-trace that communication even if it hops through US based proxies?” an NSA worker asked.

“In other words, back-trace the post from thepiratebay.org to a Chinese base proxy which came through a US based proxy, which came through another US based proxy, which came through a Russian based proxy etc”

“Assuming you mean via SIGINT metadata,” came the NOC response, “then SPCMA-trained [Supplemental Procedures Governing Communications Metadata Analysis] analysts would be able to use SPCMA-enabled tools to chain through U.S. based proxies. It is not authorized otherwise.”

While on the one hand these discussions suggest that some kind of effort is being made to protect US citizens from NSA spying, on the other it’s fairly obvious that they are being swept up en masse whether they like it or not.

Furthermore, the odds of being caught up in that dragnet only increase should U.S. citizens dare to become involved in organizations like Wikileaks or use torrent sites including The Pirate Bay. Worryingly, the threshold for becoming categorized as an associate of a “malicious foreign actor” appears to be lower than ever.