{"id":66194,"date":"2013-09-06T08:20:04","date_gmt":"2013-09-06T07:20:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/snowdens-latest-major-leak-the-nsas-secret-campaign-to-crack-undermine-internet-security\/66194\/"},"modified":"2013-09-06T08:20:04","modified_gmt":"2013-09-06T07:20:04","slug":"snowdens-latest-major-leak-the-nsas-secret-campaign-to-crack-undermine-internet-security","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/snowdens-latest-major-leak-the-nsas-secret-campaign-to-crack-undermine-internet-security\/","title":{"rendered":"Snowden's Latest Major Leak: The NSA\u2019s Secret Campaign to Crack, Undermine Internet Security"},"content":{"rendered":"
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September 5, 2013<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>
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US and British intelligence agencies have successfully cracked much of the online encryption relied upon by hundreds of millions of people to protect the privacy<\/a>\u00a0of their personal data, online transactions and emails, according to top-secret documents revealed by former contractor Edward Snowden. <\/p>\n

The files show that the National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ<\/a>\u00a0have broadly compromised the guarantees that internet<\/a>\u00a0companies have given consumers to reassure them that their communications, online banking and medical records would be indecipherable to criminals or governments. <\/p>\n

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 \u2014 “the use of ubiquitous encryption across the internet”. <\/p>\n

Those methods include covert measures to ensure NSA<\/a>\u00a0control over setting of international encryption standards, the use of supercomputers to break encryption with “brute force”, and \u2014 the most closely guarded secret of all \u2014 collaboration with technology companies and internet service providers themselves. <\/p>\n

Through these covert partnerships, the agencies have inserted secret vulnerabilities \u2014 known as backdoors or trapdoors \u2014 into commercial encryption software. <\/p>\n

The files, from both the\u00a0NSA\u00a0and\u00a0GCHQ, were obtained by the Guardian, and the details are being published today in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica<\/a>. They reveal: <\/p>\n

– A 10-year\u00a0NSA\u00a0program against encryption technologies made a breakthrough in 2010 which made “vast amounts” of data collected through internet cable taps newly “exploitable”. <\/p>\n

– The\u00a0NSA\u00a0spends $250m a year on a program which, among other goals, works with technology companies to “covertly influence” their product designs. <\/p>\n

– The secrecy of their capabilities against encryption is closely guarded, with analysts warned: “Do not ask about or speculate on sources or methods.” <\/p>\n

– The\u00a0NSA\u00a0describes strong decryption programs as the “price of admission for the US to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace”. <\/p>\n

– A\u00a0GCHQ\u00a0team has been working to develop ways into encrypted traffic on the “big four” service providers, named as Hotmail, Google, Yahoo and Facebook. <\/p>\n

The agencies insist that the ability to defeat encryption is vital to their core missions of counter-terrorism and foreign intelligence gathering. <\/p>\n

But security experts accused them of attacking the internet itself and the privacy of all users. “Cryptography forms the basis for trust online,” said Bruce Schneier, an encryption specialist and fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “By deliberately undermining online security in a short-sighted effort to eavesdrop, the\u00a0NSA\u00a0is undermining the very fabric of the internet.” Classified briefings between the agencies celebrate their success at “defeating network security and privacy”. <\/p>\n

“For the past decade,\u00a0NSA\u00a0has lead [sic] an aggressive, multi-pronged effort to break widely used internet encryption technologies,” stated a 2010\u00a0GCHQ\u00a0document. “Vast amounts of encrypted internet data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable.” <\/p>\n

An internal agency memo noted that among British analysts shown a presentation on the\u00a0NSA’s progress: “Those not already briefed were gobsmacked!” <\/p>\n

The breakthrough, which was not described in detail in the documents, meant the intelligence agencies were able to monitor “large amounts” of data flowing through the world’s fibre-optic cables and break its encryption, despite assurances from internet company executives that this data was beyond the reach of government. <\/p>\n

The key component of the\u00a0NSA’s battle against encryption, its collaboration with technology companies, is detailed in the US intelligence community’s top-secret 2013 budget request under the heading “Sigint [signals intelligence] enabling”. <\/p>\n

Funding for the program \u2014 $254.9m for this year \u2014 dwarfs that of thePrism\u00a0program, which operates at a cost of $20m a year, according to previous\u00a0NSA\u00a0documents. Since 2011, the total spending on Sigint enabling has topped $800m. The program “actively engages US and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and\/or overtly leverage their commercial products’ designs”, the document states. None of the companies involved in such partnerships are named; these details are guarded by still higher levels of classification. <\/p>\n

Republished from: AlterNet<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

September 5, 2013 \u00a0| Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. US and British intelligence agencies have successfully cracked much of the online encryption relied upon by hundreds of millions of people to protect the privacy\u00a0of their personal data, online transactions and emails, according to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":66195,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-66194","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66194\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}