Common Dreams – by Jacob Chamberlain
Internet privacy safeguards known as encryption technologies promised by email, online banking, and other such online databases have been virtually ‘defeated’ by the U.S. National Security Agency, according to new documents obtained by the Guardian, New York Times, and ProPublica.
According to the Guardian—which has reported extensively on the NSA’s dragnet surveillance practices revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden—the NSA and its British counterparts the GCHQ have used “covert measures” to control and manipulate international encryption standards to the benefit of the NSA, largely through building “industry relationships” with many technology companies and internet service providers.
As joint reporting by ProPublica and the New York Times explains, according to the documents and interviews with industry officials, the NSA has deployed “custom-built, superfast computers to break codes” and began collaborating with “technology companies in the United States and abroad” to build ‘backdoor’ entry points into their products and introduce weaknesses into their encryption standards.
The records do not identify which specific companies have been working with the NSA to this extent. However, one document does reveal that a GCHQ team has been working to develop ways into encrypted traffic on the “big four” service providers, named as Hotmail, Google, Yahoo and Facebook.
Through these relationships the NSA has become nearly immune to most encryption technologies, and has thus mastered the use of “supercomputers” to break encryption with “brute force,” leaving a dying number of encryption technologies immune to NSA surveillance.
As one of the NSA documents obtained by the news agencies states, the NSA “actively engages US and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products’ designs,” and in turn inserts “vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems.”
“US and British intelligence agencies have successfully cracked much of the online encryption relied upon by hundreds of millions of people to protect the privacy of their personal data, online transactions and emails,” the Guardian reports.
“For the past decade, NSA has lead [sic] an aggressive, multi-pronged effort to break widely used internet encryption technologies,” a 2010 GCHQ document states. “Vast amounts of encrypted internet data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable.”
“Cryptography forms the basis for trust online,” said Bruce Schneier, an encryption specialist and fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “By deliberately undermining online security in a short-sighted effort to eavesdrop, the NSA is undermining the very fabric of the internet.”
The NSA’s encryption busting program called “Sigint [signals intelligence] enabling” received $254.9 million in 2013 alone (compared to $20 million allotted to the previously exposed PRISM program).
“The encryption technologies that the NSA has exploited to enable its secret dragnet surveillance are the same technologies that protect our most sensitive information, including medical records, financial transactions, and commercial secrets,” stated Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.
Soghoian continues:
Even as the NSA demands more powers to invade our privacy in the name of cybersecurity, it is making the internet less secure and exposing us to criminal hacking, foreign espionage, and unlawful surveillance. The NSA’s efforts to secretly defeat encryption are recklessly shortsighted and will further erode not only the United States’ reputation as a global champion of civil liberties and privacy but the economic competitiveness of its largest companies.
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So what? Go ahead and read everything I write, and you can listen to my phone calls too. What are you going to do about it?
Screw Snowden and his “revelations” that everyone already knew about. This is more “big brother” fear mongering that tries to silence dissent, but the fact of the matter is that there are too many dissenters for them to do anything about it. They can imprison or kill any of us, but they run the risk of losing a few soldiers in the process, and what about the other 300 million? Every time they show their tyrannical hand they create more dissent, and that’s why they’re forced to constantly portray their assaults on the people as somehow beneficial to us.
Fear is the ONLY weapon they can use against this population, and you don’t have to succumb to it. They’re constantly trying to convince you that you’re all alone**, and they’re watching everything, but nothing could be further from the truth. Any physical attacks they launch result in more dissent, and will bring them closer to losing their heads, so it’s not likely that they’ll do anything but continue their scare tactics for as long as they’re able to.
**They work so hard to discourage demonstrations, because those events show people that they’re NOT alone, and that’s why your attendance at demonstrations is important. People in passing cars realize for the first time that there’s an army of us with the same complaints that they’ve been quiet about. DON’T BE QUIET.
100% agreed, JR. If I cared the least bit what they think of me, or was worried about the consequences, I sure as hell wouldn’t be posting here. I’m already a terrorist a thousand times over, according to THEIR (bogus) interpretation of the word. Ask me if I care. I will continue to post the truth, regardless of what they say or do. I will not be a party to their deception.
This is what I love about FTT. We refuse to be cowed into submission by this treasonous trash, posing as our ‘government’.
We SHALL prevail.
The dystopian fantasies of yesteryear are now a reality. We’ve allowed the coming of an age where the civil liberties our forefathers fought so hard for are being eroded by the day. Freedom of Press, Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Assembly are mere ghostly images of their original intent. We’ve woken up to an Orwellian Society of Fear where anyone is at the mercy of being labeled a terrorist for standing up for rights we took for granted just over a decade ago. Read about how we’re waging war against ourselves at http://dregstudiosart.blogspot.com/2011/09/living-in-society-of-fear-ten-years.html