NSA Break Encryption Worldwide

According to fresh revelations from the Edward Snowden cables, the National Security Agency has cracked most encryption believed to be a safeguard for commerce and banking systems all over the globe and supposed to protect sensitive information, such as medical records, email, web searches, online chats, and phone calls. This is not about the Americans, but about all others, globally, as well.

Since 2000, the NSA has been building supercomputers capable of breaking complex codes and encryption. In addition, the NSA collaborated with American tech companies to build backdoors directly into their products and services. In response, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple and the other giants swore there were no deliberate backdoors built into their software or hardware.

In the meantime, a 2010 UK spy agency GCHQ memo speaking of the NSA’s work claimed that the outfit has been leading an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used online encryption technologies and vast amounts of encrypted online data was exploitable at the time. It was reported that $250 million is annually spent on a program which influences technology company product designs.

GCHQ is itself known to be largely bankrolled by the American taxpayer. In addition, it was previously revealed that other English-speaking countries were also allied with the American spying efforts. Snowden leaks suggest even those were compromised, despite any international agreements. It was revealed that GCHQ team has worked its way into encrypted traffic from major online services, including Hotmail, Google, Yahoo, and Facebook.

It recently became known that truly secure email company Lavabit, whose services were used by Edward Snowden to transmit information to Guardian journalists, has shut itself down in light of these leaks. Its head announced that if ordinary people knew what he knew about email communications, they wouldn’t have been using it. Popular law blog Groklaw also decided to pull the plug and cited concerns about being able to properly provide anonymity where necessary.

Taking into account the latest revelations of the US being aggressively pursuing all Internet communications, including encrypted ones, the privacy minded activists or civil liberties groups may get another reason to withdraw from the worldwide web.