Notes from Cyberia
Is NSA monitoring

visitors to its site?

Four attempts to visit the NSA's public website at NSA.gov via a privacy protection service failed this evening.

I entered the NSA's URL into the proxy service HideMyAss, which returned the message: "The requested resource could not be loaded."

However, proxy viewing was successful on first attempt for the public sites of the White House, Department of Homeland Security, FBI, CIA and Rep. Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat.

It appears that the NSA may have blocked proxy viewing so that it can track and identify all visitors to its public site.

Privacy app fails for blogspot

HideMyAss is a proxy service that acts as a middleman for your internet activity, making it very hard if not impossible for the sites you visit to track you.

The company offers a free service as a promotion for its "professional" service costing about $60 a year. So one can imagine that the free service won't always work well. For example, HideMyAss says its free service works for Youtube. However, someone, perhaps Google, disables the videos once you reach Youtube via proxy.

But, it's hard to imagine the reasoning that causes HideMyAss to forbid going to certain Blogger sites, such as my blog Newz from Limbo, while permitting others Blogger sites.

If I go to a blog powered by Blogger, but that lacks the word "blogspot" in the URL, the proxy takes me there. But if the word "blogspot" is part of the URL, the proxy returns this message: "Sorry this proxy does not allow the requested site... to be viewed."

So one is left to wonder whether the barring of easy proxy viewing of blogspot blogs is a simple commercial decision to encourage use of the paid service or whether this stems from federal counterterrorism unit's concerns that encrypted viewing of such blogs will interfere with the monitoring of those blogs considered to be conduits to terrorists.