In response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by Michael Morisy through MuckRock, the US National Security Agency (NSA) has released Untangling the Web; A Guide to Internet Research (.pdf; 38.5MB), its manual for internet intelligence gathering.
Most of the publication appears to be quite ordinary for anyone who’s used the internet for more than a few years, but as Kim Zetter writing for Wired notes, the “Google Hacking” chapter holds some interesting — but nothing not already widely known — bits. The chapter offers tips on searching for wayward Excel spreadsheets, Russian password files, and misconfigured websites that allow directories to be browsed.
Zetter points out that while the NSA manual’s authors insist nothing they describe is illegal — using only “publicly available search engines to access publicly available information that almost certainly was not intended for public distribution” — Andrew Aurenheim was recently convicted of accessing publicly available information on AT&T’s website and sentenced to more than three years in prison.
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