Beginning in 2000, as encryption tools were gradually blanketing the Web, the N.S.A. invested billions of dollars in a clandestine campaign to preserve its ability to eavesdrop. Having lost a public battle in the 1990s to insert its own “back door” in all encryption, it set out to accomplish the same goal by stealth. ...NYT
Who's the hero and who's the villain? Who deserves a freedom medal and who deserves punishment for high crimes and misdemeanors?
The agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, the documents show.
Many users assume — or have been assured by Internet companies — that their data is safe from prying eyes, including those of the government, and the N.S.A. wants to keep it that way. The agency treats its recent successes in deciphering protected information as among its most closely guarded secrets, restricted to those cleared for a highly classified program code-named Bullrun, according to the documents, provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor. ...NYT
How each American judges the contractor -- Snowden -- and the leadership and supporters of the NSA will be a interesting. I'm very wary of NSA fans.
The language used in the New York Times investigative report is interesting, telling: "The N.S.A. hacked into target computers to snare messages before they were encrypted."
And there have been some sane reactions to all this, reactions coming from offshore.
When the British analysts, who often work side by side with N.S.A. officers, were first told about the program, another memo said, “those not already briefed were gobsmacked!” ...NYT
US intelligence evidently tried to stop the Times from publishing this report. (Snowden's documents also went to ProPublica and The Guardian.)
The news organizations removed some specific facts but decided to publish the article because of the value of a public debate about government actions that weaken the most powerful tools for protecting the privacy of Americans and others....NYT
When Al Qaeda set out to bring down democracy/capitalism I guess we weren't bright enough to figure out that the way we handled the threat was to... bring down democracy and threaten capitalism ourselves. The latter -- capitalism -- seems more durable until one starts to add up the evidence of disaffection with transnational corporations and western financial systems over the years. And what NSA is doing to corporate encryption systems can't be very popular with those anyone in business. Not to mention foreign governments including, of course, our allies.
...The N.S.A. has been deliberately weakening the international encryption standards adopted by developers. One goal in the agency’s 2013 budget request was to “influence policies, standards and specifications for commercial public key technologies,” the most common encryption method.
Cryptographers have long suspected that the agency planted vulnerabilities in a standard adopted in 2006 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the United States’ encryption standards body, and later by the International Organization for Standardization, which has 163 countries as members.
Classified N.S.A. memos appear to confirm that the fatal weakness, discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007, was engineered by the agency. The N.S.A. wrote the standard and aggressively pushed it on the international group, privately calling the effort “a challenge in finesse.”
“Eventually, N.S.A. became the sole editor,” the memo says. Even agency programs ostensibly intended to guard American communications are sometimes used to weaken protections....NYT
The pushback from corporations has begun, according to the report. With any luck, the American voter will wake up and make it impossible for our government to accrue this much power. It's very clear that we have rogue agencies at work. They've been rogues for years and -- this is worth some contemplation -- there have been successive members of Congress who have allowed them to continue. None of these people should be allowed to survive as either representatives or government workers.
