Communications of the ACM
Internet Giants Erect Barriers to Spy Agencies
Google and other leading Internet service providers are trying to make it more difficult and costly for government intelligence agencies to penetrate their networks.
Credit: Connie Zhou/Google
Google and other major Internet service providers are accelerating efforts to make it harder and more costly for government intelligence agencies to penetrate their networks, which is seen as a threat to their business.
For example, Google is laying its own fiber-optic cable under the oceans in an attempt to guarantee it has greater control over its customer data movement.
This new resistance is spurring governments to push back, with Vodafone reporting a number of governments have demanded they tap directly into its communication networks.
Google security chief Eric Grosse suggests the U.S. National Security Agency's (NSA) widespread intelligence gathering invited this new competition. Most U.S. companies say they never knowingly allow NSA to compromise their systems, but documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden indicate the agency was able to do so, for example by exploiting Google's data centers to intercept unencrypted traffic.
Intelligence officials bemoan the lack of cooperation by U.S. tech companies, which has made their covert programs more difficult to carry out. Warnings from officials that this will inevitably lead to an intelligence failure has caused companies to respond the government is to blame, and intelligence agencies' actions have jeopardized online security for everyone.
From The New York Times
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