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Latest Privacy Revelations Show It’s Up to Canadians to Protect Themselves
Latest Privacy Revelations Show It’s Up to Canadians to Protect Themselves
The most important self-help step? Get into encryption
Another week, another revelation originating from the seemingly unlimited trove of Edward Snowden documents. Last week, the CBC reported that Canada was among several countries whose surveillance agencies actively exploited security vulnerabilities in a popular mobile web browser used by hundreds of millions of people. Rather than alerting the company and the public that the software was leaking personal information, they viewed the security gaps as a surveillance opportunity.
In the days before Snowden, these reports would have sparked a huge uproar. More than half a billion people around the world use UC Browser, the mobile browser in question, suggesting that this represents a massive security leak. At stake was information related to users’ identity, communication activities, and location data — all accessible to telecom companies, network providers, and surveillance agencies.
Yet coming on the heels of global revelations of surveillance of network exchange points and internet giants along with Canadian disclosures of daily mass surveillance of millions of internet downloads and airport wireless networks, nothing surprises anymore. Instead, there is a resigned belief that privacy on the network has been lost to surveillance agencies who use every measure at their disposal to monitor or gather virtually all communications.
While the surveillance stories become blurred over time, there is an important distinction with the latest reports. The public has long been told that sacrificing some privacy may be part of a necessary trade-off to provide effective security. However, by failing to safeguard the security of more than 500 million mobile users, the Five Eyes surveillance agencies — Canada, the U.S., U.K., Australia, and New Zealand — have sent the message that the public must perversely sacrifice their personal security as well.
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From the Very Creation of the Internet, U.S. Spy Agencies Fought to Block Encryption
From the Very Creation of the Internet, U.S. Spy Agencies Fought to Block Encryption
American spy agencies have intentionally weakened digital security for many decades. This breaks the functionality of our computers and of the Internet. It reduces functionality and reduces security by – for example – creating backdoors that malicious hackers can get through.
The spy agencies have treated patriotic Americans who want to use encryption to protect their privacy as extremists … or even terrorists.
As Gizmodo’s Matt Novak points out, this attack started at the very birth of the internet:
In the 1970s, civilian researchers at places like IBM, Stanford and MIT were developing encryption to ensure that digital data sent between businesses, academics and private citizens couldn’t be intercepted and understood by a third party. This concerned folks inthe U.S. intelligence community who didn’t want to get locked out of potentially eavesdropping on anyone, regardless of their preferred communications method. Despite their most valiant efforts, agencies like the NSA ultimately lost out to commercial interests. But it wasn’t for lack of trying.
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When the NSA got wind of the research developments at IBM, Stanford and MIT in the 1970s they scrambled to block publication of their early studies. When that didn’t work, the NSA sought to work with the civilian research community to develop the encryption. As Stowsky writes, “the agency struck a deal with IBM to develop a data encryption standard (DES) for commercial applications in return for full pre-publication review and right to regulate the length, and therefore the strength of the crypto algorithm.”
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Can Iceland become the ‘Switzerland of data’? – Features – Al Jazeera English
Can Iceland become the ‘Switzerland of data’? – Features – Al Jazeera English.
