Communications of the ACM
Nsa Able to Foil Basic Safeguards of Privacy on Web
The National Security Agency campus in Fort Meade, Md.
Credit: Associated Press
The National Security Agency uses a variety of means to overcome encryption technologies, such as supercomputers, technical strategies, court orders, and persuasion, according to documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The documents show that NSA has cracked much of the encryption technology that protects global commerce and banking systems, trade secrets, and medical records, and secures the emails, Web searches, Internet chats, and phone calls of users worldwide. "For the past decade, NSA has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies," according to a 2010 memo from Britain's Government Communications Headquarters.
NSA's efforts to decipher secured information are restricted to those cleared for a highly classified program dubbed Bullrun, according to the documents. The extent of NSA's decoding capabilities is known only to a few top analysts from NSA and its counterparts in Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The documents show how the agency works with Internet companies to compel them to comply with court orders, use their encryption keys, or alter their software or hardware.
The documents also reveal that NSA spends more than $250 million annually on its Sigint Enabling Project, which "engages the U.S. and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products' designs" to make them "exploitable."
From The New York Times
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