[governance] NY Times Editorial: Close the N.S.A.'s Back Doors

[michael gurstein]

Editorial
Close the N.S.A.'s Back Doors
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Published: September 21, 2013

In 2006, a federal agency, the National Institute of Standards and
Technology, helped build an international encryption system to help
countries and industries fend off computer hacking and theft. Unbeknown to
the many users of the system, a different government arm, the National
Security Agency, secretly inserted a "back door" into the system that
allowed federal spies to crack open any data that was encoded using its
technology.

Documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, make clear
that the agency has never met an encryption system that it has not tried to
penetrate. And it frequently tries to take the easy way out. Because modern
cryptography can be so hard to break, even using the brute force of the
agency's powerful supercomputers, the agency prefers to collaborate with big
software companies and cipher authors, getting hidden access built right
into their systems.

The New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica recently reported that the
agency now has access to the codes that protect commerce and banking
systems, trade secrets and medical records, and everyone's e-mail and
Internet chat messages, including virtual private networks. In some cases,
the agency pressured companies to give it access; as The Guardian reported
earlier this year, Microsoft provided access to Hotmail, Outlook.com,
SkyDrive and Skype. According to some of the Snowden documents given to Der
Spiegel, the N.S.A. also has access to the encryption protecting data on
iPhones, Android and BlackBerry phones.

These back doors and special access routes are a terrible idea, another
example of the intelligence community's overreach. Companies and individuals
are increasingly putting their most confidential data on cloud storage
services, and need to rely on assurances their data will be secure. Knowing
that encryption has been deliberately weakened will undermine confidence in
these systems and interfere with commerce.

The back doors also strip away the expectations of privacy that individuals,
businesses and governments have in ordinary communications. If back doors
are built into systems by the N.S.A., who is to say that other countries'
spy agencies - or hackers, pirates and terrorists - won't discover and
exploit them?

The government can get a warrant and break into the communications or data
of any individual or company suspected of breaking the law. But crippling
everyone's ability to use encryption is going too far, just as the N.S.A.
has exceeded its boundaries in collecting everyone's phone records rather
than limiting its focus to actual suspects.

Representative Rush Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, has introduced a bill that
would, among other provisions, bar the government from requiring software
makers to insert built-in ways to bypass encryption. It deserves full
Congressional support. In the meantime, several Internet companies,
including Google and Facebook, are building encryption systems that will be
much more difficult for the N.S.A. to penetrate, forced to assure their
customers that they are not a secret partner with the dark side of their own
government.


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