Intelligence agencies NSA and GCHQ have been circumventing online encryption efforts through a combination of supercomputers, back doors and court orders, according to reports in the New York Times, Guardian and ProPublica.
Documents leaked to the Guardian by former NSA security contractor Andrew Snowden revealed that tech companies have been presssured by security agencies to build entry points into security products since 2000 – rendering most online data encryption methods worthless.
Snowden has been granted asylum for one year in Russia after fleeing the US.
The NSA was said to to have spent more than $250 million this year on its Sigint Enabling Project, which engages the IT industry in an effort to get companies to make their commercial products "exploitable". This is more than 10 times the amount spent on the Prism surveillance programme revealed earlier this year.
In addition, it was reported the British intelligence agency GCHQ has been attempting to hack into the protected traffic at Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Microsoft’s Hotmail. GCHQ had developed "new access opportunities", according to a leaked document.
The NSA has also been working for years to weaken international encryption standards, the report said. NSA memos appear to confirm that the agency planted vulnerabilities in an encryption standard adopted in 2006 by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology.
The NSA sees the ability to decrypt information a vital capacity, and the US competes with China, Russia and other countries in that area, according to the documents referenced in the report.
IDG News Service
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