Personal to public interest lawyers: If online services lied to their customers as to the security they provided, isn't that cause for lawsuits?
BBC - US and UK intelligence have reportedly cracked the encryption codes protecting the emails, banking and medical records of hundreds of millions of people.
Disclosures by leaker Edward Snowden allege the US National Security Agency and the UK's GCHQ successfully decoded key online security protocols.
They suggest some internet companies provided the agencies backdoor access to their security systems.
The NSA is said to spend $250m (£160m) a year on the top-secret operation.
Encryption involves scrambling text to make it unreadable without the right key. Typically data encryption uses numbers hundreds of digits long as those keys. That renders data secure because it would take thousands of years to try all possible keys for a particular message.
The NSA and GCHQ have apparently managed to get around this several different ways. They have used supercomputers to crank through potential keys very quickly, exploited known weaknesses in widely used web and mobile security protocols to read messages, and forced tech firms to install backdoors in software.
In addition, the NSA is believed to have subverted a US federal program to create new encryption algorithms so it can more easily get at any messages or data they were supposed to protect.
Critics say the NSA/GCHQ approaches are short-sighted because any backdoor could equally be used by spies and crooks and undermines the role the web plays in modern life.
It is codenamed Bullrun, an American civil-war battle, according to the documents published by the Guardian in conjunction with the New York Times and ProPublica.
The reports say the UK and US intelligence agencies are focusing on the encryption used in 4G smartphones, email, online shopping and remote business communication networks.
The encryption techniques are used by internet services such as Google, Facebook and Yahoo.
Friday, 6 September 2013
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