> Searching for the Tails, operating system, another Windows alternative popular among human rights watchers, will also land you on the deep-packet inspectee list.
Oops. Too late.
These sort of criteria can't possibly narrow down a set of people enough to justify spying on them. It's like trying to surveil every adult male after a shooting because most shooters are adult men: technically true, and you've eliminated over half of all humans, but most of the people left are still innocent.
Much of what we know about these programs are just from leaked presentation slides from Edward Snowden. That means these are slides made to digest a big process for management or new people.
The slides indicate that they are aware that "turbulence" can occur, and also that they are sensitive to issues of overwhelming data volume and bad signalling. It's also clear that they take multiple factors beyond simple web behavior, such as if you are a foreign language speaker in a region.
Unfortunately we don't know the specifics of this program. We don't really know what exclusionary criteria they use, or what strong inclusionary factors gets somebody tagged for deeper automated surveillance. The factors likely are likely being tuned all the time by engineers and statisticians, like, for example, snooping on Google is probably not easy anymore due to routine HTTPS, so they probably have changed that part of the program.
> Searching for the Tails, operating system, another Windows alternative popular among human rights watchers, will also land you on the deep-packet inspectee list.
Oops. Too late.
These sort of criteria can't possibly narrow down a set of people enough to justify spying on them. It's like trying to surveil every adult male after a shooting because most shooters are adult men: technically true, and you've eliminated over half of all humans, but most of the people left are still innocent.