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NSA revelations OTD

2013-09-05 20:19:02.709447+00 by Dan Lyke 2 comments

NY Times: NSA foils much internet encryption.

According to an intelligence budget document leaked by Mr. Snowden, the N.S.A. spends more than $250 million a year on its Sigint Enabling Project, which “actively engages the U.S. and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products’ designs” to make them “exploitable.” Sigint is the abbreviation for signals intelligence, the technical term for electronic eavesdropping.

Similar story at ProPublica and at The Guardian and round-up from The Atlantic. Among other sources, via MeFi.

Of course anywhere there's a back door, there's probably more than one person looking to exploit it. Might wanna make sure you've got a BSD or Linux firewall in front of that TR069 router, definitely don't depend on HTTPS using the stock CAs, and likely avoid any commercial OS options on any devices you want to trust for secure communications.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Net Culture Cryptography Economics Woodworking ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: made: 2013-09-05 20:44:52.212297+00 by: Dan Lyke

http://www.theguardian.com/wor...ow-to-remain-secure-surveillance

It ain't the algorithms, it's the implementations and the policies.

#Comment Re: made: 2013-09-05 21:55:24.022149+00 by: ebradway

What was it I said over there? :

"Don't be Evil" assumes a constant definition of "evil". Recent findings of NSA and DEA snooping has altered the definition of "evil" in Google's favor.

Of course, if Google was following NSA orders... Befehl ist Befehl...