A student that I had considerable contact with asked me to send a recommendation for him to a Moscow university. Following his instructions, I prepared a letter, sent it off to my office to be printed on official letterhead, came in and signed it, then scanned it and sent it off as an email attachment. The email got there, but someone deleted the attachment. I guess someone in NSA or in the Russian equivalent is trying to decode it as I write.
Whilst I was aware emails can, theoretically, be delayed for several hours due to internet congestion, I have not heard of any mechanism for intercepting them, diverting and reading them, and then forwarding them on, either altered or not.
The fact email can, and will be if the stars are aligned right, delivered in virtual real-time makes it treacherous. I suppose NSA or whomever, could have it set up to deliver all your mail to their own address; read it and then forward it on spoofing your sent from address, but it seems unlikely. Obviously they can spy on your mail in various ways; it’s the interception and holding that seems difficult.
This fellow auto-forwarded copies of his supervisor’s email to himself, but that’s copying to read later; not withholding or delaying them.
Here’s a Quora Answer:
How do intelligence agencies intercept emails?
There are choke points under Echelon ( which sounds like A. E. Housman’s Ashes under Uricon ), which explains how the NSA and it’s subordinate Anglophone agencies could do it, but not necessarily possible with the more limited resources of most other foreign agencies
*Basically it is a network of high end servers which are installed at critical choke points on various networks (for instance on T-carrier lines such as a T4 and up) which sit between countries, between major ISPs, on satellite links, etc. *
I would guess that the servers at the various intercept points are linked to a master collection point (probably NSA at Fort Meade MD for the United States)
Again though, I doubt if they would remove an attachment. The Russian Federation would if they could, following their grim precedent, but what’s in it for them if they do have those resources ?
I’ve had pdfs stripped off by security programs before. I’m not sure if it was my local McAfee or something on the server side.
Yeah, it’s more likely an over-zealous virus scanner or anti-spam program nabbed your attachment than a security agency. What kind of file was the scan saved as?
Since he wanted the letterhead and a signature on it and had it scanned, it’s some sort of image file, I’d imagine.
Yeah, but a pdf is more likely to be flagged as a virus than a tiff or a jpeg.
But it’s really just an idle question, since I doubt I can actually address the problem.
It was a pdf file (that is what the scanner, which is basically a photocopier, produces).
Update: I resent it and this time it got through.