Just when you thought public opinion of the NSA couldn’t get any worse, the United States is implicated in another massive government surveillance program.
Community members of the open-source GNU Project have unearthed evidence of HACIENDA, a government surveillance program used to map servers in 27 countries. Discovered by security researchers Julian Kirsch, Christian Grothoff, Jacob Appelbaum and Holger Kenn, the HACIENDA surveillance technology employs a technique known as port scanning to detect server vulnerabilities.
According to Heise Online, intelligence agencies of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand are involved in HACIENDA and share the data each agency collects.
More information can be found from the Free Software Foundation.
