News & Comment

From the guardian:

Revealed: US and UK spy agencies defeat privacy and security on the internet

• NSA and GCHQ unlock encryption used to protect emails, banking and medical records
• $250m-a-year US program works covertly with tech companies to insert weaknesses into products
• Security experts say programs 'undermine the fabric of the internet'

3046 comments

$250 million? Is that all? Must be a slow news day. I've always been dubious about using powerful computers to crack encrypted messages. There is so much encrypted data being sent, and even powerful, high-speed computers take time to crack an encrypted message, I doubt they would be able to decrypt it all, and if you didn't, how would you know you got the important stuff? How would you know you didn't miss the one key message? Seems like using a shotgun on a swarm of mosquitos. Even if each shotgun pellet takes out a mosquito, it's not really going to have any effect on the swarm.
    The key piece of news here is that our sooper-secret spy agencies don't need their sooper-dooper computers, not when the outfits doing the encrypting install backdoors which allow access to the original, unencrypted data. The BBC comments:

But some experts argue that such efforts could actually undermine national security, noting that any back doors inserted into encryption programs can be exploited by those outside the government.

The thing that really gets me though is 3046 comments. I understand a lot of people have something to say about this, but who is going to read 3000 comments?