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

[Nyangkwe Agien Aaron]

Michael

I agree with the editorial because the "back door" enables every one
every where to pry into the private info of every one every where. A
back door is a back door and any wants who knows of its existence can
use it. It is as simple as that, not to talk of professional hackers.

That means the we shall hence forth have no privacies. Animals we
shall become, not so?

The US Congress ought to vote Rep. Rush Holt's bill and save us from a
horrendous situation

Imagine arm robbers monitoring the movement in one's bank account.
Just easy to locate when a fat sum of money has been collected and
hop: a hold up is organized.

That is exactly what NSA is doing

Aaron

On 9/26/13, michael gurstein <gurstein at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
>
>


-- 
Aaron Agien NYANGKWE
P.O.Box 5213
Douala-Cameroon
Telephone +237 73 42 71 27

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