In the latest in a long line of leaked information from ex CIA Edward Snowden it seems that the NSA is in collaboration with the US, Canada, New Zealand and the British GCHQ. They have an active and aggressive programme for obtaining encryption keys and more worryingly, they have also attempted to put backdoors into cryptographic standards, designed for secure communications. This allows them to access and easily decrypt massive amounts of data.

News organisation Propublica also revealed that “For at least three years, one document says, GCHQ, almost certainly in close collaboration with the N.S.A., has been looking for ways into protected traffic of the most popular Internet companies: Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Microsoft’s Hotmail. By 2012, GCHQ had developed “new access opportunities” into Google’s systems, according to the document.”

One of the most worrying revelations is from Paul Kocher, a leading cryptographer who helped design the SSL protocol. He recalled how the N.S.A. lost the heated national debate in the 1990s about inserting into all encryption a government back door called the Clipper Chip. “And they went and did it anyway, without telling anyone,” Said Paul.

Kitguru Says: Is any data private any more? If the NSA can go against the wishes of the US Government, who is policing the police?

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