Professor told to delete NSA-related blog post from university site

A university professor who wrote a blog post detailing how the National Security Agency breaks secure internet connections was asked to remove the article from the school’s servers, inciting cries of censorship throughout the blogosphere.

Matthew Green, a cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins
University (JHU) in Baltimore, Maryland, penned the blog post
last week after it was revealed that the NSA has spent years
strong-arming companies into installing a so-called backdoor into
some of the world’s most popular communications services.

He began by explaining a series of conversations he had with
reporters before the leaks were published. The journalists asked
Green how the NSA would install covert monitors in everyday data
exchanges, assuming they had the wherewithal to do so.

“I admit that at this point one of my biggest concerns was to
avoid coming off like a crank,” Green wrote of his answers at
the time. “After all, if I got quoted sounding too much like
an NSA conspiracy nut, my colleagues would laugh at me…Not only
does the worst possible hypothetical I discussed appear to be
true, but it’s on a scale I couldn’t even imagine. I’m no longer
the crank, I wasn’t even close to cranky enough.”

Green goes on to explain how to break a cryptographer system
(attack the cryptography, go after the implementation, then
access the human side). He also details which supposedly secure
codes are the most vulnerable and tells how the NSA violated the
trust of Americans and much of the tech industry.

On Monday, the professor described on Twitter the ordeal that
followed the post’s publication.

Countless people throughout social media and around the internet
have wondered just whose fault it is. The NSA has listed Johns
Hopkins as one of the agency’s Centers of Academic Excellence, in
part because of cyber-security research conducted at the
college.

Hours after tweeting about the Dean’s request, Green clarified
his comments on the social media platform.

“So listen, I’m not trying to talk about this much because
anything I say will make it worse. What I’ve been told is that
someone on the [Applied Physics Laboratory] side at JHU
discovered my blog post and determined that it was
hosting/linking to classified documents,” he wrote.

“This requires a human since I don’t believe there’s any
automated scanner for this process…All I know is that I received
an email this morning from the Interim Dean of the school of
Engineering schools asking me to take down the post and to desist
from using the NSA logo. He also suggested I should seek counsel
if I continued.”

Copyright: RT