Internet Security? It seems that when it comes to yours and mine it’s nonexistent due to NSA’s hacking team.

I personally gave up on using Anti-Virus software years ago as I felt that it seemed to actually bring more problems than ever it helped eliminate, trusting more in my Firewall, now it seems that a new leak appearing in the Guardian and The New York Times details the NSA and GHCQ efforts to circumvent, undermine, and crack various forms of web encryption in order to violate your personal information. This information is being based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the man responsible for trying to open our eyes and get wise. If the details in the document are accurate, the HTTPS and SSL encryption used by most email and banking services offers little to no protection against NSA surveillance, leaving us all under an umbrella of no privacy.

The articles have a detailed report of a decade long project by Uncle Sam’s boys in black with plans to attack encryption standards from every angle, employing server farms for brute-force decryption, using malware to intercept messages before encryption could take place, and working from within the tech industry to ensure the adoption of protocols that would be easier to circumvent. So the government is now acting like a mini version of SkyNet and trying to take liberties with our privacy, next up they will just start saying its for our own protection and all for the good of the people. What people I do not know, but not us for damn sure, as American’s are used to some type of decorum when its comes to our private information and even more importantly our financial privacy.

Once back in 2006 the NSA even became the sole editor of an encryption standard, able to insert back doors and workarounds at will. The resulting code was often suspected of government tampering, but never proven until now. The thing is since we have already seen this type of action before, why is no one acting upon it? Most of us here in America are already trapped and just do not fully realize how trapped we are. Due to credit and the ever so keep up with the Jones sigma most people are in debt and working 40+ hours every week taking up most of their time and energy in the process, so when they get home starting a revolution is not on their mind, yet. Take away too much privacy and personal comfort too quickly, is a sure way to rock the boat and get people to take more notice

As a result of the boys in black getting noticed, a 2010 GHCQ memo says, “Vast amounts of encrypted Internet data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable.” The decryption effort was particularly important to the UK’s surveillance efforts, as it allowed them to make sense of the torrents of encrypted data they collected from tapping into undersea web cables. Without some method of decoding the data, collection would have been useless.  The documents that were leaked also show the governments aggressive efforts to collect and store decryption keys for the NSA’s Key Provisioning Service, which the documents say is capable of decrypting many messages immediately. The keys are reportedly gathered through both legal and extra-legal means, although experts told the Times it was likely the agency was hacking into corporate servers to obtain many of them. Hacking gets most people years of jail time, loss of money, and huge restrictions on where and if they can ever even touch a computer again. Or there is the Darth Vader way of just serving the evil empire in its quest to crush our rights and privacies.

This new information also answers many of the questions raised by the NSA’s PRISM program. After the details of the program leaked, companies lined up to deny bulk decryption of user data, leading many to wonder how the NSA was able to access the data without the companies’ help in any case, raising more questions than it answers. The main problem with all this new information in today’s leaks does not fully answer the question definitively, they help explain many of the contradictions involved, and raise troubling new questions about the encryption standards protecting everything from private emails to credit card transactions. The “Big Brother” we have all been warned about is now here and rearing its ugly head, if only in a low growl, but this is where it all starts, taking apart your privacy one small piece at a time and hoping no one really notices. Thanks for reading Tech of Tomorrow and thanks to The Verge for the original article content. So does all this sound a bit unnerving to you? Do you think the government did us a favor, or do you feel they are just doing the same things they punish others for? Lets us know your thoughts my friends, peace.

Source: The Verge