Open Letter from Top U.S. Computer Security Experts Slams NSA Spying As Destroying Security

 

The Washington Post

Some of the biggest names in cryptography condemn NSA spying in open letter

• By Andrea Peterson

• January 24 at 11:29 am

(AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

Some of the biggest names in cryptography and computer science just released an open letter condemning the surveillance practices of the U.S government. "Media reports since last June have revealed that the US government conducts domestic and international surveillance on a massive scale, that it engages in deliberate and covert weakening of Internet security standards, and that it pressures US technology companies to deploy backdoors and other data-collection features," said a statement posted to masssurveillance.info. "As leading members of the US cryptography and information-security research communities, we deplore these practices and urge that they be changed."
In a speech last week, President Obama addressed concerns related to NSA's 215 domestic phone records collection program, but he did not remark on reports that the U.S. government had weakened encryption as part of its practices.
Read More Here
.....

WashingtonsBlog

Open Letter from Top U.S. Computer Security Experts Slams NSA Spying As Destroying Security

Posted on January 25, 2014 by WashingtonsBlog

The NSA Is Making Us All Less Safe

An open letter today from a large group of professors – top US computer security and cryptography researchers – slams the damage to ecurity caused by NSA spying:

Inserting backdoors, sabotaging standards, and tapping commercial data-center links provide bad actors, foreign and domestic, opportunities to exploit the resulting vulnerabilities.
The value of society-wide surveillance in preventing terrorism is unclear, but the threat that such surveillance poses to privacy, democracy, and the US technology sector is readily apparent. Because transparency and public consent are at the core of our democracy, we call upon the US government to subject all mass-surveillance activities to public scrutiny and to resist the deployment of mass-surveillance programs in advance of sound technical and social controls. In finding a way forward, the five principles promulgated at http://reformgovernmentsurveillance.com/ [a site launched by Google, Apple, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, AOL, Yahoo and LinkedIn] provide a good starting point.
The choice is not whether to allow the NSA to spy. The choice is between a communications infrastructure that is vulnerable to attack at its core and one that, by default, is intrinsically secure for its users. Every country, including our own, must give intelligence and law-enforcement authorities the means to pursue terrorists and criminals, but we can do so without fundamentally undermining the security that enables commerce, entertainment, personal communication, and other aspects of 21^st-century life. We urge the US government to reject society-wide surveillance and the subversion of security technology, to adopt state-of-the-art, privacy-preserving technology, and to ensure that new policies, guided by enunciated principles, support human rights, trustworthy commerce, and technical innovation.

The Washington Post notes that these are some of the top names in computer cryptography and security, including heavyweights in the government.
Many other top security experts agree:

• IT and security professionals say spying could mess up the safety of our internet and computer systems

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation notes:

“By weakening encryption, the NSA allows others to more easily break it. By installing backdoors and other vulnerabilities in systems, the NSA exposes them to other malicious hackers—whether they are foreign governments or criminals. As security expert Bruce Schneier explained, ‘It’s sheer folly to believe that only the NSA can exploit the vulnerabilities they create.’”
Read More Here

Related articles

• Open Letter from Top U.S. Computer Security Experts Slams NSA Spying As Destroying Security
• Prominent cryptography and security researchers deplore NSA's surveillance activities
• Prominent cryptography and security researchers deplore NSA's surveillance activities
• Some of the biggest names in cryptography condemn NSA spying in open letter

China, US trade hacking accusations

by Staff Writers

Washington (AFP) June 23, 2013

Hong Kong failure to arrest Snowden 'troubling': USWashington (AFP) June 23, 2013 - The United States is disappointed by Hong Kong's "troubling" failure to arrest fugitive intelligence leaker Edward Snowden before he fled the territory, an official said Sunday. A Department of Justice spokesperson insisted US officials had fulfilled all the requirements of Washington's extradition treaty with the autonomous Chinese region and were "disappointed" by the decision to let him go. Snowden, a 30-year-old former intelligence contractor, is wanted by the United States on espionage charges, after he quit his job with the National Security Agency and fled to Hong Kong with a cache of secret documents. On Sunday, Snowden left Hong Kong and fled for Moscow, despite Washington having requested his arrest and extradition. Hong Kong officials said the documentation supporting the extradition request had been incomplete. But the US Department of Justice denied there was anything missing. "The US is disappointed and disagrees with the determination by Hong Kong authorities not to honor the US request for the arrest of the fugitive," the spokesperson said in a statement. "The request for the fugitive's arrest for purposes of his extradition complied with all of the requirements of the US-Hong Kong Surrender Agreement," the statement said. "At no point, in all of our discussions through Friday, did the authorities in Hong Kong raise any issues regarding the sufficiency of the US's provisional arrest request," it said. "In light of this, we find their decision to be particularly troubling." The statement said senior US officials had been in touch with their Hong Kong counterparts since June 10, when they learned Snowden was in Hong Kong and leaking details of secret surveillance programs to the media. On Wednesday, US Attorney General Eric Holder spoke to Hong Kong Secretary for Justice Rimsky Yuen and urged Hong Kong to honor the request for Snowden's arrest. The Hong Kong government had said that, as it "has yet to have sufficient information to process the request for provisional warrant of arrest, there is no legal basis to restrict Mr Snowden from leaving Hong Kong."

China and the United States traded hacking charges on Sunday as Washington accused Beijing of stealing US intellectual property and the Chinese authorities expressed concern over US cyberattacks.
The back-and-forth between the United States and China over cyber spying followed new claims by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden that the US spy agency was snooping on Chinese targets.
Snowden told Hong Kong's Sunday Morning Post that US spies had hacked the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing -- home to one of six "network backbones" that route all of mainland China's Internet traffic -- and the Hong Kong headquarters of Pacnet, which operates one of the Asia-Pacific region's largest fiber-optic networks.
Snowden, who arrived in Moscow on Sunday, reportedly on his way to Venezuela, also said the US spy agency was hacking Chinese mobile phone companies to gather data from millions of text messages.
NSA chief Keith Alexander, asked by ABC television if his agency carries out such activities as hacking Chinese cellphones to steal SMS messages, said "we have interest in those who collect on us as an intelligence agency.
"But to say that we're willfully just collecting all sorts of data would give you the impression that we're just trying to canvass the whole world," he said.




Read More Here