Nistar36 - ArticlesStories about security, privacy and surveillance. Real events, verified facts and lessons worth knowing before you need them.https://nistar36.com/feed_en.xml2026-10-20T00:00:00ZNistar36https://nistar36.com/https://nistar36.com/favicon.svgGAFAM. Five companies that know more about you than your loved ones dohttps://nistar36.com/articles/gafam_en.html2026-10-20T00:00:00Z2026-10-20T00:00:00ZGoogle, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. You use their services every day - often without even knowing it. For free, but not without a price.Cincinnatus, who could not wait any longerhttps://nistar36.com/articles/snowden_en.html2026-10-19T00:00:00Z2026-10-19T00:00:00ZHow one program that never got installed nearly buried the biggest leak in intelligence history - and what the Edward Snowden affair teaches us.Security through isolation. The story of Qubes OShttps://nistar36.com/articles/qubes-os_en.html2026-10-19T00:00:00Z2026-10-19T00:00:00ZA Polish researcher who embarrassed Microsoft in 2006 came to the conclusion that no system can be written without bugs. So she decided to build one in which bugs do not matter. Today Edward Snowden calls it the best operating system there is.The FBI versus Tor. How people in the darknet were really caughthttps://nistar36.com/articles/fbi-tor_en.html2026-10-19T00:00:00Z2026-10-19T00:00:00ZSilk Road, Freedom Hosting, Playpen, Operation Onymous, AlphaBay. Every time, the headlines screamed that "Tor has been broken". Every time, the truth was more interesting - and more instructive.Tor in Germany. What we really know about the BND, the NSA and the German policehttps://nistar36.com/articles/tor-germany_en.html2026-10-19T00:00:00Z2026-10-19T00:00:00ZGermany is one of the pillars of the Tor network. It is also the country where the NSA monitored a Tor server run by a student in Erlangen, where the BND tapped cables in Frankfurt, and where police in 2024 de-anonymised a user of the network. Here is what follows from all this - without conspiracy theories."We kill people based on metadata". Why who you talk to says more than what you sayhttps://nistar36.com/articles/metadata_en.html2026-10-19T00:00:00Z2026-10-19T00:00:00ZThe content of a conversation can be encrypted. Who called, whom, when and from where - that remains. And from this seemingly dull information, a whole life can be read.