Read Online Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert - Free Book Online

reconnaissance purposes. The Americans built a fleet of specially designed satellites whose purpose is to collect signals intelligence (sigint). Some sigint satellites operate in geostationary orbit 36,000 kilometres from the Earth’s surface, and are used to zero in on radio frequencies of everything from microwave telephone signals to pagers and walkie-talkies. Such geostationary sigint satellites deploy huge parabolic antennas that are unfolded in space once the satellite is in position, with the signals being sent to NSA listening stations located in allied countries like Australia (Pine Gap), and Germany (Bad Aibling). Because the satellites operate in deep space, and radio signals travel in a straight line, radio frequencies can be collected efficiently and with little degradation. (Other sigint satellites take unusual orbits and can reportedly hover over regions of interest for longer periods and at lower altitudes.)The NSA also operates sigint collection facilities at ground stations whose mission is to collect transmissions from civilian communications satellites. Typically, these enormous interception terminals, which look like giant angled birdbaths, are located in secure areas proximate enough to terrestrial transmission points to function properly. For example, one of the key signals intelligence stations in Canada is at the Canadian Forces Station Leitrim, just south of Ottawa, strategically positioned to intercept diplomatic communications moving in and out of the nation’s capital.
    Signals intelligence gathering is highly secretive, but it is a world we should all get to know better. Originally, the objects of sigint operations were other states’ military and intelligence agencies: ballistic missile-test telemetry or operational instructions sent by high-ranking Politburo members. As the Cold War came to a close, however, this bipolar conflict atomized into a multitude of national security threats, some of which emanate from transnational terrorist groups and organized crime, and the scope of sigint operations became much broader and more widely dispersed across global civil society. As the volume of data flowing through global networks is exploding in all directions, and the tools to undertake signals intelligence have become more refined, cheaper, and easier to use, the application to cyberspace is obvious.
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    Although cyberspace is often experienced as an ethereal world separate from physical reality, it is supported by a very real infrastructure, a tangible network of code, applications, wires, and radio waves. Behind every tweet, chat message, or Facebook update, there is also a complex labyrinth of machinery, cables and pipes buried in trenches deep beneath the ocean, and thousands of orbiting satellites, some the size of school buses. In addition tobeing complex and fragile, this physical infrastructure contains a growing number of filters and chokepoints. Pulling back its layers is like pulling back curtains into dark hallways and hidden recesses, which, it turns out, are also objects of intense political contests.
    There is another component of cyberspace, separate from its physical infrastructure, but that is also growing in leaps and bounds and becoming a critical part of the domain: the data. Information related to each and every one of us (and everything we do) is taking on a life of its own. It, too, has become an object of geopolitical struggle. Every call we make, every text and email we send, increasingly everything we do as we go about our daily lives, is recorded as a data point, a piece of information in the ever-expanding world of “Big Data” that is insinuating itself deeper and deeper into our lives and the communications environment in which we live.

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Big Data: They Reap What We Sow
    From August 31, 2009 to February 28, 2010, German citizenMalte Spitz had virtually every moment of his life tracked – every step he took, where he slept and shopped, flights and