“This is the nuclear winter of data security”
by digby
I’ve never known Michael Froomkin to be hyperbolic. So this is a big deal:
The latest revelations about the NSA’s ability to undermine most encryption used online dwarf anything we have learned previously. What is worse, the NSA has worked to insert weaknesses into products — backdoors.
the National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have broadly compromised the guarantees that internet companies have given consumers to reassure them that their communications, online banking and medical records would be indecipherable to criminals or governments.
The agencies, the documents reveal, have adopted a battery of methods in their systematic and ongoing assault on what they see as one of the biggest threats to their ability to access huge swathes of internet traffic – “the use of ubiquitous encryption across the internet”.
Those methods include covert measures to ensure NSA control over setting of international encryption standards, the use of supercomputers to break encryption with “brute force”, and – the most closely guarded secret of all – collaboration with technology companies and internet service providers themselves.
Through these covert partnerships, the agencies have inserted secret vulnerabilities – known as backdoors or trapdoors – into commercial encryption software.
It’s everything, everything that Cypherpunks ever muttered about over their beer.
This is the secret that likely explains why the Obama and Cemeron administrations were willing to do almost anything to try to get Snowden, the reporters he leaked to, and the anyone who touched their data.
This is the nuclear winter of data security.
Froomkin notes that there is some evidence that this has not only been used for national security. And I still think it’s obvious that there have been or will be commercial applications, if only among the contractors who are “entrusted” to do this work. But what’s at stake is something more fundamental. He quotes Bruce Schneir:
“[b]y subverting the internet at every level to make it a vast, multi-layered and robust surveillance platform, the NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract.”
Schneier says that in light of these revelations we have to rebuild the internet.
Froomkin asks, “are we up to it?”
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