How the N.S.A. cracked the web
POSTED BY MATT BUCHANAN at The New Yorker
It’s been nearly three months since Edward Snowden started telling the world about the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance of global communications. But the latest disclosures, by the Guardian, New York Times, and ProPublica are perhaps the most profound yet: the N.S.A. and its partner agency in the United Kingdom, the Government Communications Headquarters, possess significant capabilities to circumvent widely used encryption software in order to access private data.
Encryption poses a problem for intelligence agencies by scrambling data with a secret code so that even if they, or any other third-party, manages to capture it, they cannot read it—unless they possess the key to decrypt it or have the ability to crack the encryption scheme. Encryption has become only more pervasive in the decade since the N.S.A.’s “aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies” began in 2000. When you log into Gmail or Facebook, chat over iMessage, or check your bank account, the data is typically encrypted. This is because encryption is vital for everyday Web transactions; if for instance, you were to log in to your Gmail account using a park’s open wireless network and your username and password were transmitted in plain form, without being encrypted, your credentials could potentially be captured by anyone using that same network.
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