More dirty laundry was revealed yesterday after President Obama's panel that was appointed to see just why Edward Snowden and others have had to take such drastic steps to wake up the American populace, released its report.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/nsa-should-stop-undermining-encryption-standards-obama-panel-says/A presidential advisory committee today recommended that the US government stop any efforts to undermine encryption standards or attack commercial software. The panel's report comes in response to the National Security Agency leaks of Edward Snowden and makes 46 recommendations.
The recommendations wouldn't prevent the US from creating malware to attack its enemies (as it did with Stuxnet) but it would at least prevent the government from weakening commercial software. This could change how the NSA does business. One NSA program, revealed in the New York Times, seeks to "Insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems, IT systems, networks, and endpoint communications devices used by targets."
Security experts, including Bruce Schneier, have warned that the NSA's work has undermined the security of the Internet.
It seems a lot of the dirty tricks employed by the NSA are coming out in the open and whilst folks are encouraged to think that the NSA crack most encryption using top of the range computing technology their real work is to weaken encryption products and demand backdoor access in some cases to such software, this of course makes it easier for the enemies of the US and its allies to "break" too, a point obviously lost on the NSA.
