sometimes shit just slips through the cracks, huh? like the amazingly overlooked little gem that ran at wired’s blog the other day: the newbie’s guide to detecting the nsa, posted by kevin poulsen on his 27b stroke 6 blog…he was discussing the overall nsa related wiretap issues, att’s involvement etc…actually, wired’s own ryan singel has written an excellent piece about this entire issue: stumbling into a spy scandal

so yeah, the real meat in that blog bit was kevin’s instruction set for windows users explaining how to find out if the nsa is in fact sniffing your data packets using the tracert command…it’s a fairly simple instruction set, suggesting that any traffic routed to “att.net” is a bad sign, but you should really worry if you see the string “sffca.ip.att.net” which would suggest that your data is being copied directly into room 641a at att, and from there to the nsa….

…oh, but how will you be able to even run the scan test? you’ll need to go into your ms dos prompt (windows users only, duh, because the nsa already knows that all radical left wing mac users are suspect) and type (at the prompt): “C:\> tracert nsa.gov” …this will return a string following your data packet’s route, but i strongly suggest that you visit the entire blog post which explains this because it offers a very detailed example run by the author to show you how it works, including a full return on the query detailing the path and the occurrence of the highly suspect room 641a string…

btw, if you’re like “tracert? wintergreen or spearmint?” tracert is the command title for ‘traceroute’ - per wikipedia, “traceroute is a TCP/IP utility which allows the user to determine the route packets take to reach a particular host. traceroute works by increasing the “time to live” value of each successive packet sent. The first packet has a time to live (TTL) value of one, the second two, and so on. When a packet passes through a host, the host decrements the TTL value by one and forwards the packet to the next host.”

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