The NSA, FBI, and Internet Security

Over the past few months we've learned a lot about how the US government looks at its own citizens. We've learned this through the actions of Edward Snowden. He's done us a great service by forcing a conversation that the NSA and FBI didn't want us to have. The NSA lied to the Senate recently by claiming that it never tracked US citizens through Cell Phones. We would never have known about these activities if it wasn't for Snowden.

Snowden was using email to send information back and forth between himself and Glenn Greenwald. Since email is in one of those fuzzy gray areas of the law around data retention and government access to it this has caused a bit of a problem. It make things more difficult Snowden used an encrypted email service called Lavabit. It's encryption was at such a level that when the FBI requested data from it, they were confounded and essentially attempted to blackmail (legally of course) the owner into handing over the encryption key. This would have effectively rendered the service these people were paying for worthless. They were paying to have their email traffic be secured from both public and private entities.

As we hear and more about how the US government has been behaving towards internet security, the more we're learning that the NSA and other US agencies are doing their best to thwart it. They have worked with the NIST and weakened the encryption key they developed. The problem with these backdoors is that if it's there for the "good guys" (whoever that might be) it's also there for the "bad guys" (whoever that might be). This isn't just general encryption keys, it's things that we use every day without using it. Whenever we are using any website that includes "https" we are using a basic encryption protocol called SSL. Think about when you're banking, you see the https. Google now allows you to use this when you send information to and from them. This encryption has also been broken by the NSA. This is our personal stuff and if it's broken by the NSA it can be broken by other people. Now does this mean we're likely to have a rash of new fraud cases or theft cases? No, as it's been compromised for some time. However, people do know about it now and this of course is a greater cause for concern.

What can we do about this? Well, first, look into more secure encryption methods. I wouldn't be surprised if Google and applications like HTTPS everywhere will change their algorithm in result. Second, contact your representative and your senator. I'm lucky my senator in Oregon is very vocal (Ron Wyden) not everyone is so please help inform your leaders. Third, buy from companies that you know haven't given up data to the NSA, don't use Facebook and the like and basically try to follow the great writing that Sean did several months ago over on KBMOD. He nailed it then and it's even more pressing than before to keep up with security.