“In a clandestine, decade-long effort to defeat digital scrambling, the National Security Agency, along with its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), have used supercomputers to crack encryption codes through ‘brute force’ and have inserted secret ‘back doors’ into software with the help of technology companies…
“Bruce Schneier, a security technologist, … said … [the] NSA has ‘subverted’ much of the Internet and tech companies that form its backbone. ‘They fundamentally undermine the social contract of the Internet – which is that you get what you think you get and it works,’ Schneier said. ‘An agency has subverted vast swaths of this to turn the Internet into a surveillance engine. Now the Internet doesn’t do what people thought it did. They’ve done it through secret agreements with companies, so essentially all the companies you deal with on the Internet have been lying to you. They have basically sucked the trust out of the Internet – the NSA and these companies. It’s a public-private partnership to turn the internet into a surveillance engine.”’
And we are its fuel.
9:25 pm on October 5, 2013
