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It isn’t just online advertisers who are benefited from user-tracking cookies. The nationwide Security Agency has been captivating advantage of the cookies that companies force on clients to pinpoint targets they want to hack, according to recently out Edward Snowden documents.

The NSA and the British secret agent agency GCHQ look for ad tracking cookies in their wiretapped internet packets to recognize precise people browsing the Internet. They chiefly focus on Google’s ubiquitous “PREF” cookie, which doesn’t recognize the user’s name or e-mail address, but does consist of matchless numeric codes that categorize the user’s browser to websites.

These codes help the secret agent agencies sharpen in on particular machines they want to attack, according to documents acquired by the Washington Post. The documents say the NSA uses the cookies to “allow remote development.” CNE, or computer network exploitation, is the military’s term for hacking conducted to get hold of intelligence.

The NSA also uses the cookies to classify and single out a definite individual’s interactions among the enormous amounts of data it accumulates through internet apps, allowing them to zero-in on the interactions of someone who is already under distrust, the Post reports.

The documents don’t point towards how the NSA got hold of the Google PREF cookies, but they indicate that cookies are surrounded by the data that authorities can acquire under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act with a court command. Google would not tell the Post if it has received wishes for cookie data on users. Companies are in general prohibited from revealing the nature of national security requests they obtain from the government, but Google and others have been struggling the government in court for the ability to reveal general information about the requests they consider.

Advertisers and internet firms have long dispute that the cookies they assign to users are inoffensive and simply give them the ability to provide more significant and targeted advertising and services to users. But news that the NSA is piggybacking on these cookies and using them to discover users belies these assertions.

 

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