Tor Developer Fears NSA Interception of Amazon Purchase

Andrea Shepard, a Seattle-based core developer for the Tor Project, fears her recently ordered keyboard may have been intercepted by the NSA.

Following the purchase of a new IBM Thinkpad Keyboard from Amazon.com, Shepard discovered her package to be taking a strange detour to the East Coast, revealed by a tweeted screenshot of her shipment tracking information.

You’d think #NSA shipment ‘interdiction’ would be more subtle… pic.twitter.com/KVCscLbdgG

— Andrea (@puellavulnerata) January 24, 2014

Instead of shipping straight towards Seattle from the Amazon storage warehouse in Santa Ana, California, the package made its way clear across the country to Dulles, Virginia before finally being “delivered” to Alexandria, an area deep inside what some privacy experts refer to as America’s “military and intelligence belt.”

While not uncommon to see packages sent to major shipping hubs in different areas of the country, the package’s “delivered” status clearly shows the item’s destination was changed without Shepard’s approval, leading privacy experts to take notice.

“Could Amazon have made a mistake in notifying Shepard about this extra journey, which was likely meant to stay a secret? If this really is an example of the TAO laptop-interception program in action, does this mean that companies like Amazon are made aware of the government’s intention to “look after” consumer products ordered by their customers? Or did Shepard receive this weird notice only after some sort of glitch in the NSA’s surveillance matrix?” PrivacySOS asks.

According to recently revealed internal NSA documents, TAO, or the Office of Tailored Access Operations, is the NSA’s top operative unit responsible for intercepting shipping deliveries of high-interest targets.

“If a target person, agency or company orders a new computer or related accessories, for example, TAO can divert the shipping delivery to its own secret workshops… At these so-called ‘load stations,’ agents carefully open the package in order to load malware onto the electronics, or even install hardware components that can provide backdoor access for the intelligence agencies,” Der Speigel noted last month.

Given the NSA’s deep interest in breaking Tor, a popular online anonymity tool, some speculate Shepard’s keyboard could likely have been implanted with a bug known as “SURLYSPAWN,” a tiny keylogging chip implanted in a keyboard’s cabling. According to NSA slides, a keyboard implanted with the bug can be monitored even when the computer is offline.

Other documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the NSA’s many attempts at identifying users of Tor, which has only received very minor success.

“We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time,” an internal NSA presentation states. “With manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users.”

Whether Shepard’s incident was the result of a simple mistake or an NSA interception is still unclear. Given the agency’s history of targeting Jacob Appelbaum, Tor’s main advocate, the idea of a top Tor developer being targeted by the NSA is far from unlikely.

“If it ever shows, I’ll be inspecting it as closely as I’m capable of,” Shepard said on Twitter.

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