Published time: September 05, 2013 19:57
The latest top-secret documents leaked to the media by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden reveal that United States and British spy agencies have invested billions of dollars towards efforts to make online privacy obsolete.
The New York Times, the Guardian and ProPublica all reported on
Thursday that newly released Snowden documents expose the great
lengths that the National Security Agency and Britain’s
Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, have gone to in
order to eavesdrop on encrypted Internet communications.
According to the latest Snowden leak, the NSA and its British counterpart
have circumvented the encryption methods used to secure emails,
chats and essentially most Internet traffic that was previously
thought to be protected from prying eyes.
The price tag for such an endeavor, the Guardian reported, is
around a quarter-of-a-billion dollars each year for just the US,
and involves not just intricate code-breaking, but maintaining
partnerships with the tech companies that provide seemingly
secure online communication outlets.
“The files show that the National Security Agency and its UK
counterpart GCHQ have broadly compromised the guarantees that
Internet companies have given consumers to reassure them that
their communications, online banking and medical records would be
indecipherable to criminals or governments,” James Ball,
Julian Borger and Glenn Greenwald reported for the Guardian.
Outside of the shadowy collaboration with Silicon Valley
companies, the governments have also reportedly employed
supercomputers capable of decrypting codes commonly used by the
most popular online protocols, including HTTPS, voice-over-IP and
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL).
“For the past decade, NSA has lead [sic] an aggressive,
multi-pronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption
technologies,” a 2010 GCHQ document referenced by the
Guardian reads. “Vast amounts of encrypted Internet data which
have up till now been discarded are now exploitable.”
With regards to reaching that goal through private-sector
cooperation, the Guardian reported that the NSA works with tech
companies to “covertly influence” their products.
So significant is the leak, the Times and ProPublica reported,
that intelligence officials asked that the documents not be
published in fear that the disclosures would prompt surveillance
targets, such as terrorist organization, to alter the way they
communicate online.
In an editorial published alongside the scoop this week by
ProPublica, reporters Stephen Engelberg and Richard Tofel said
the outlet decided to go ahead with the story because “It
shows that the expectations of millions of Internet users
regarding the privacy of their electronic communications are
mistaken.”
News of the agency’s vast code-breaking capabilities comes just
weeks following the shuttering of no fewer than two Internet
services that provided encrypted email for paying customers.
Last month, the founder of email provider Lavabit announced that
he was shutting down his company because staying in
business would likely force him “to become complicit in crimes
against the American people.”
“Our government can order us to do things that are morally and
ethically wrong, order us to spy on other Americans and then
order us, using the threat of imprisonment, to keep it all
secret,” Levison told RT.
The next day, competitor Silent Circle announced they’d be
suspending their encrypted email service as
well.
In the three months since Snowden fled the US and began leaking
classified documents to the media, a number of international
outlets have published revelations made possibly by the analysis
of top-secret files. According to the Times, Snowden supplied
reporters with 50,000 documents, and the Guardian’s Greenwald
said at least dozens were, in his opinion, newsworthy.
The latest revelation comes days after the media began reporting
on the leaked US intelligence “black budget” supplied by Snowden. In that document,
US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper prefaced an
executive summary by saying that America is “investing in
groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial
cryptography and exploit Internet traffic.”
According to the secret funding request, the US Consolidated
Cryptologic Program asked for $11 billion in fiscal year 2013
towards covert, code-breaking programs.
Republished from: RT