Tor users are on the NSA long-term surveillance list

TweakTown reports using Tor is a fireproof way to become a long-term surveillance and data retention target for the NSA. This news originated from German site Tagesschau, where Lena Kampf, Jacob Appelbaum and John Goetz write about the NSA's rules to identify "targets".

According to the report, the NSA may have been separating people into two groups: a group of people with the technical know-how to be private and a second group of people "who don't know". Allegedly the goal was to capture all of the information from everybody in the first group.

The article even claims that reading news like this report makes you quite suspicious. What this means is that unlike the rest of the world, your data won't be flushed from the NSA database on a 48-hour or 30-day basis but will be kept indefinitely.

They report that the NSA targets anyone who searches for online articles about Tails, or Tor. Anyone who even uses Tor becomes an instantly target for long-term surveillance and data rentention. Both Tor and Tails have been part of the mainstream discussion for online security, surveillance and privacy for quite sometime. For the NSA to just instantly put surveillance and retention on these people is yet another step of unbelievable, in an already unbelievable breach of users' privacy and rights.