The NSA must be watched for more than the obvious reasons

They’re watching us. We should watch them. That’s the easy part to understand. It does, however, go much deeper than that. There are real benefits that can be achieved by learning more about what the NSA does and how they go about doing it.

Today, the Guardian is reporting on how the NSA targets Tor users, along with details of how it uses centrally placed servers on the internet to attack individual computers. This builds on a Brazilian news story from last week that, in part, shows that the NSA is impersonating Google servers to users; a German story on how the NSA is hacking into smartphones; and a Guardian story from two weeks ago on how the NSA is deliberately weakening common security algorithms, protocols, and products.