TLB
The latest Edward Snowden-powered exposé published by the New York Times, ProPublica and the Guardian is, to me, the most frightening. It reveals that the National Security Agency has moved beyond its historic role as a code-breaker to become a saboteur of the encryption systems. Its work has allegedly weakened the scrambling not just of terrorists’ emails but also bank transactions, medical records and communications among coworkers.
Here’s the money graf:
“The NSA hacked into target computers to snare messages before they were encrypted. And the agency used its influence as the world’s most experienced code maker to covertly introduce weaknesses into the encryption standards followed by hardware and software developers around the world.”
I’d be disappointed if the NSA hadn’t figured out how to do that hacking trick. But adding vulnerabilities to standard encryption techniques? That’s just making the job easier for hackers to make sense of the scrambled data they steal.
The outrage is still pouring in from various advocacy groups. Here’s a succinct condemnation by the Center on Democracy and Technology, one of the more centrist of these organizations:
“These revelations demonstrate a fundamental attack on the way the Internet works,” senior staff technologist Joseph Lorenzo Hall wrote in a statement. “In an era in which businesses, as well as the average consumer, trust secure networks and technologies for sensitive transactions and private communications online, it’s incredibly destructive for the NSA to add flaws to such critical infrastructure. The NSA seems to be operating on the fantastically naïve assumption that any vulnerabilities it builds into core Internet technologies can only be exploited by itself and its global partners.”
Every form of encryption can theoretically be cracked, given enough time and processing power. But the mere use of encryption has encouraged data thieves to look elsewhere for targets, on the same principle that even weak bike locks are effective when there are unlocked bikes nearby.
The easier it is to pick the electronic locks used online, the less of a deterrent they become. More
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