Irreal

Bruce Schneier, one our best independent security experts, has some useful advice on staying safe from NSA surveillance. He is working with the Guardian and has access to the Snowden documents so he can bring some reasoned analysis to the situation. The short story is that the math behind modern encryption is still sound and that the NSA’s reported “breakthroughs” almost certainly involve attacks on implementations, stealing or coercing the private keys of service providers, and the weakening of crypto standards.

He offers 5 things you can do to keep yourself safe. You can read his advice at the link but the TL;DR is encrypt your data and communications with open source software. The open source part is crucial given that the NSA has reportedly influenced major vendors to build in backdoors or weaknesses. Open source doesn’t provide absolute protection against this, of course, but it does make it much harder to sneak weaknesses into the system.

Schneier’s article is a good recapitulation of where we, as users and NSA targets, stand today and what steps we can take to keep our private matters private. It’s a good read. Recommended.

Glenn Greenwald’s latest article is out at the The Guardian. Despite repeated assurances that Americans’ data are respected and protected it turns out that the NSA is sharing raw intelligence including Americans’ data with Israel. As it happens, I don’t have a problem with Israel and am happy to have them as one of America’s friends. I also don’t have a problem with my pal Bob but that doesn’t mean I want to share all my private data with him. This is yet another example of how out of control the NSA is.

This may seem to be an American-centric problem but, of course, it’s not. The point to take away here is that the NSA has no respect for innocent Americans’ rights and even less for that of those from other countries. As the story at the link makes clear, the NSA’s brethren in those foreigners’ countries are only too happy to cooperate with the NSA and sell out their own citizens.

We must, all of us, insist that our governments knock it off and start respecting our right to privacy. Just whining won’t make it happen, of course, but a recent event here in the US shows us what’s possible. Whatever your feelings about gun control, a successful recall election in Colorado shows what can happen when voters feel the government is ignoring their wishes. We really need to hold our politicians’ feet to the fire and insist they put a stop to spying on their own citizens. Really, why do we even need to say this?

John Dvorak is at his hyperbolic best in this piece on the NSA. In it, he throws out red meat for those of us enraged by what the NSA is doing. His take is that the NSA sees Americans as the enemy and that those in congress—the members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Intelligence Committee—are responsible for this and should be thrown out of office.

I often disagree with Dvorak and frequently find him annoying but it’s hard to disagree with what he says here.

Patrick Gray over at Wired wrote an interesting article in which he posits that Tech Companies and Government May Soon Go to War Over Surveillance. His notion is that while tech companies may have been willing to accommodate the NSA or allow themselves to be pushed around before the Snowden revelations they now realize that the subsequent destruction of their users’ trust represents an existential threat. One way of regaining that trust is to put in place robust systems that make NSA surveillance difficult or impossible. By doing this now they put the government in a bind. As Gray remarks, it’s one thing to pass laws prohibiting such changes and quite another to mandate that they be removed from users’ devices It’s pretty clear that the public wouldn’t tolerate the latter.

Now, it would appear that the first shot in that war has been fired. The Washington Post is reporting that Google has accelerated its program to encrypt data as it moves between Google data centers. Before this change, data in flight between the data centers represented rare points of vulnerability. Whatever their previous transgressions, if any, it’s clear that Google is moving at speed to make their users’ data tamper-proof.

When I first read Gray’s article I was a bit skeptical that the war would come to pass. Google’s action gives me hope that maybe it will.

update: represent → represents

Bruce Schneier has a powerful article in The Atlantic on The Only Way to Restore Trust in the NSA. His prescription is to appoint an independent special council to clean up the mess. My first reaction when reading that was to snort, “Yeah, that’s gonna happen.” I still think that’s correct but Schneier makes a strong case for why it’s needed and why it would, in the end, help the NSA too.

The problem, Schneier says, is that no one any longer believes anything the NSA says and no one believes anything the President says about it either. The NSA has lied and been discovered lying repeatedly resulting in a complete breakdown in trust in the agency, the Intelligence community, and, if the commenters’ opinions are representative, government itself.

A special council with the power and a technically qualified staff to do a thorough investigation could report to the country the truth concerning what the NSA is doing and then we could have rational discussion about what we want to allow and shut down those programs that are clearly illegal. As I said, I doubt that will happen and that’s too bad.

Be sure to read Schneier’s article. It’s one of his best concerning the NSA scandals.