NSA cracked most online encryption

[Arbo]

http://news.yahoo.com/report-nsa-cracked-most-online-encryption-075457559--politics.html


The National Security Agency, working with the British government, has secretly been unraveling encryption technology that billions of Internet users rely upon to keep their electronic messages and confidential data safe from prying eyes, according to published reports based on internal U.S. government documents.The NSA has bypassed or altogether cracked much of the digital encryption used by businesses and everyday Web users, according to reports Thursday in The New York Times, Britain's Guardian newspaper and the nonprofit news website ProPublica. The reports describe how the NSA invested billions of dollars since 2000 to make nearly everyone's secrets available for government consumption.
In doing so, the NSA built powerful supercomputers to break encryption codes and partnered with unnamed technology companies to insert "back doors" into their software, the reports said. Such a practice would give the government access to users' digital information before it was encrypted and sent over the Internet.
"For the past decade, NSA has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies," according to a 2010 briefing document about the NSA's accomplishments meant for its UK counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. Security experts told the news organizations such a code-breaking practice would ultimately undermine Internet security and leave everyday Web users vulnerable to hackers.

Have they gone too far?

[SassyLady]

Americans have lost their backbone and could care less about privacy anymore. Society is too lazy to care what the government knows about them as long as they can continue getting their immediate gratification needs met.

Overton Window scenario .... things that used to be considered extreme are now the norm simply because we've become to lazy to stand up for what we think is right. It's the drip, drip, drip of the moral decay of society and individual rights. Our "federal family" needs to know everything so they can "provide what they think we need".

[Arbo]

Overton Window scenario .... things that used to be considered extreme are now the norm simply because we've become to lazy to stand up for what we think is right.

Exactly. "and when they came for me, there was nobody left to fight..."

[SassyLady]

Exactly. "and when they came for me, there was nobody left to fight..."

No one left to fight for you or against you? If they come for me I will not go down without a fight.

[Arbo]

No one left to fight for you or against you? If they come for me I will not go down without a fight.

It is a reference to a famous poem by Martin Niemoller. It was about the sloth of germans during the rise of the Nazi's. There have been edited versions that drop some of his originals, or add in other groups, or change 'speak' to 'fight for', but the sentiment remains the same.


First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the Socialists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.

It seems highly applicable to the USA as our rights are picked away one by one, as we have a government that now uses the IRS to target groups that it disagrees with, as we have a 'Homeland Security' department that puts out documents saying former AMERICAN military personnel are potential terrorists...