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MAP MONDAY: NSA spy hotspots from around the world

Given that tomorrow is The Day We Fight Back against mass surveillance online, it seems more than appropriate to pick Sniffmap as this week’s map’o’the’week. It’s a clever little piece of code which gives you some idea of how much data the spy services of the Western world are intercepting on a routine basis, and then overlays it on a map of the world.

Using information gleaned from the Snowden reports on surveillance by the American security services, the NSA, Sniffmap runs random tests on international internet traffic originating from a country, and looks to see how much of it passes through nodes known to be monitored by the ‘Five Eyes’ group of countries – the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

According to Snowden reports, these countries share data intercepted online, so the theory is that if 50% of traffic originated in – say – South Africa passes through one of these countries, it’s been harvested. The science isn’t perfect, as Sniffmap readily admits, and it also fails to take into account data captured by non-Five Eyes countries. But as an awareness raising project it’s peerless.

If you’re curious, Sniffmap estimates that about 60% of South African internet traffic ends up being scrutinised by the NSA and its allies. To find out how much is captured by South African security services, might I suggest that you come along to this talk tomorrow night?

If you want to help the Sniffmap project to improve its dataset – which is severely lacking in many African countries – it’s easy. You don’t have to install anything on your PC – full instructions are here.

 

 

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