Saturday, September 7, 2013

Can Google counter NSA?

I don't think so.. They can try to counter novice hacker at the most... There is no doubt that folks at Google are smart.. very smart.. but nothing can beat the brute force and power of these national government run agencies..

Whatever their justification may be.. whatever noble cause or dreadful scenario they may be outlining as their justification to snoop into your inbox.. nobody is perfect and ultimately humans are humans.. These agencies like NSA, they are run by mere mortal humans and whenever these mortal humans get extreme power, they get corrupted.. there is misuse of these powers beyond original cause or motive and powerless mortals are crushed.. biggest example of this corruption is our Dear Mr. President Obama.. What not was promised by him before he got his role.. He painted Bush as evil person who has taken all the rights of Citizens in the name of war on terrorism.. part of the war (Iraq) which in-fact turned out to be one of the greatest and costliest mistake for US.

Nevertheless, we had thought that things will be restored back to normal when our Dear Mr. Obama comes to white house.. but we forgot the addiction of power part.. with white house comes unprecedented powers which whitewashed our Dear Mr. Obama's memory of promises to restore balance back to citizens rights.. What a fool we were??? thinking that everything will be back to normal..

At first that wiki-leak case.. which finally culminated in 35 years of prison for Mr. Manning and kind of permanent asylum status for Julian Assange. Then this case of our Snowden bhayyia.. I don't know, neither do I care about technicalities of these cases.. I only know that these individuals got truth about sleaziness of government run and supported dirty laundry.. Off-course, government officials whose laundry came out in open ought to go after these individuals.. But not our Dear Mr. President Obama.. Et tu Obama???? 

I would have appreciated if Mr. Obama would have come out in open and accepted that these operations are running and they are for whatever blah blah reasons.. and let go these daring individuals who just got truth out in public.. 

I seriously thought that Dear Mr. President Obama will initially give some supporting statements for his officials but after few weeks he simply forget about these individuals and pardon them or drop cases against them on some stupid technical reason which is not hard to create.. but relentless persuasion against these individuals who dared to bring out truth and only truth about sleazy operations of our own government funded by our money??? Whether you pardon them or not.. Dear Mr. President Obama.. we will never.. Whatever your justification for this stupid relentless persuasion of  so called criminal justice.. We will never pardon  you.. I hope in the history of presidents also.. your name will come as Bush part two.. 


NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY

Google hurries to slow spying


Tech giant accelerates encryption in backlash against surveillance



By Craig Timberg


Washington Post


Google is racing to encrypt the torrents of information that flow among its data centers around the world in a bid to thwart snooping by the NSA and the intelligence agencies of foreign governments, company officials said Friday.

The move by Google is among the most concrete signs yet that recent revelations about the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance efforts have provoked significant backlash within an American technology industry that U.S. government officials long courted as a potential partner in spying programs.


Google’s encryption initiative, initially approved last year, was accelerated in June as the tech giant struggled to guard its reputation as a reliable steward of user information amid controversy about the NSA’s Prism program, first reported in the Washington Post and the Guardian that month. Prism obtains data from U.S. technology companies, including Google, under various legal authorities.

Encrypting information flowing among data centers will not make it impossible for intelligence agencies to snoop on individual users of Google services, nor will it have any effect on legal requirements that the company comply with court orders or valid national security requests
 for data. But company officials and independent security experts said that increasingly widespread use of encryption technology makes mass surveillance more difficult — whether conducted by governments or other sophisticated hackers.
“It’s an arms race,” said Eric Grosse, vice president for security engineering at Google. “We see these government agencies as among the most skilled players in this game.”

Experts say that, aside from the U.S. government, sophisticated government hacking efforts emanate from China, Russia, Britain and Israel.

The NSA seeks to defeat encryption through a variety of means, including by obtaining encryption “keys” to decode communications, by using supercomputers to break codes, and by influencing encryption standards to make them more vulnerable to outside attack, according to reports Thursday by The New York Times, the Guardian and ProPublica, based on documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

But those reports made clear that encryption — essentially converting data into what appears to be gibberish when intercepted by outsiders — complicates government surveillance efforts, requiring that resources be devoted to decoding or otherwise defeating the systems.

Among the most common
 tactics, experts said, is to hack into individual computers or other devices used by people targeted for surveillance, making what amounts to an end run around coded communications.

Security experts said the time and energy required to defeat encryption forces surveillance efforts to be targeted more narrowly on the highestpriority targets — such as terrorism suspects — and limits the ability of governments to simply cast a net into the huge rivers of data flowing across the Internet.

“If the NSA wants to get into your system, they are going to get in. … Most of the people in my community are realistic about that,” said Christopher Soghoian, a computer security expert at the American Civil Liberties Union.
 “This is all about making dragnet surveillance impossible.”

The NSA declined to comment for this article. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a statement Thursday saying: “Throughout history, nations have used encryption to protect their secrets, and today terrorists, cybercriminals, human traffickers and others also use code to hide their activities. Our intelligence community would not be doing its job if we did not try to counter that.”

The U.S. intelligence community has been reeling since news reports based on Snowden’s documents began revealing remarkable new detail about how the government collects, analyzes and disseminates information — including, in some circumstances, the emails, video
 chats and phone communications of U.S. citizens.

Many of the documents portray U.S. companies as pliant “Corporate Partners” or “Providers” of information. While telecommunications companies have generally declined to comment on their relationships with government surveillance, some have reacted with outrage at the depictions in the NSA documents released by Snowden. They have joined civil liberties groups in demanding more transparency and insisting that information is turned over to the government only when required by law, often in the form of a court order.

In June, Google and Microsoft asked the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to allow them greater latitude in reporting how much information they turn over to the government.

On Friday, Yahoo issued its first “government transparency report,” saying it had received 12,444 requests for data from the U.S. government this year, covering the accounts of 40,322 users.

Google has long been more aggressive than its peers within the U.S. technology industry in deploying
 encryption technology. It turned on encryption in its popular Gmail service in 2010, and since then has added similar protections for Google searches for most users.

Yet even as it encrypted much of the data flowing between Google and its users, the information traveling between its data centers offered rare points of vulnerability to potential intruders, especially government surveillance agencies, security officials said.

User information — including copies of emails, search queries, videos and Web browsing history — typically is stored in several data centers that transmit information to each other on high-speed fiber-optic lines.

Several other companies, including Microsoft, Apple and Facebook, increasingly have begun using encryption for some of their services, though the quality varies by company. Communications between services — when an email, for example, is sent from a user of Gmail to a user of Microsoft’s Outlook mail — are not generally encrypted, appearing to surveillance systems as what experts
 call “clear text.”

“If the NSA wants to get into your system, they are going to get in … . Most of the people in my community are realistic about that. This is all about making dragnet surveillance impossible.”


— Christopher Soghoian, computer security expert, American Civil Liberties Union
 

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