Bitcoin Forum

USTIN, Texas — Glenn Greenwald, editor of the newly launched digital publication The Intercept, told attendees at SXSWi that the National Security Agency is wary of anyone who takes steps to protect their online activity from being hacked, such as using encryption tools.

“In [the NSA's] mind, if you want to hide what you’re saying from them, it must mean that what you’re saying is a bad thing,” Greenwald said via a Skype video call. “They view the use of encryption… as evidence that you’re suspicious and can actually target you if you use it.”

Greenwald is one of three journalists who activist Edward Snowden entrusted with access to his entire trove of classified documents about the NSA’s surveillance program. During the past year, Greenwald has been dissecting this massive pile of information, adding context and piecing together reports on the NSA’s more questionable surveillance activities. The results have been published in a string of bombshell articles by Greenwald, first in the Guardian and now in The Intercept. Given his access to these documents, Greenwald has a deeper understanding than most of how the NSA operates.

Greenwald’s extensive knowledge of the NSA makes what he’s saying all the more concerning.

During the panel, Greenwald said the NSA is able to target encrypted communications because so few people actually use encryption tools. That makes the people who are actually trying to stay secure stick out like sore thumbs, thus making it much easier for the agency to focus its efforts on hacking the relatively small bits of encrypted data that they intercept.

“I do think individuals have the principal obligation to protect their data,” Greenwald said, likening that responsibility to that of lawyers who protect their clients or journalists who protect their sources. But, he said, the biggest reason to begin using encryption is to make it far more difficult for the government to gain access to your data without going through the proper channels — such as legal warrants, wiretap orders, or subpoenas.

And it’s not just the NSA that Greenwald blames for the overly invasive surveillance.

“The national security state in Washington has so completely perfected the art of co-opting and capturing whatever safeguards are created, that they’re very adept at turning them into further tools for their own power rather than what they’re intended to be,” he said.

The best example of this co-opting, Greenwald said, is with the heads of congressional intelligence committees. “Very quickly, the people in those [intelligence agency] communities figured out how to install slavish loyalists as the heads of those committees so that those committees failed at their designed function to exercise oversight. …

“So you have the heads of these committees in the House and Senate — Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) — that are the leading apologists for the NSA and who wake up every day to think about ways to trick Americans into believing that there’s going to be a reform, when in reality it’s just going to be designed to strengthen the NSA,” Greenwald said.

One cause for concern is that the crowd who turned up to hear Greenwald at SXSW was a mere fraction of the size of the crowd that had gathered just hours before to hear Snowden himself address the public (also via Skype) for the first time since being exiled from the U.S. In other words, lots of people want to hear about government surveillance; not so many are interested in hearing about how to stop it or slow it down.

Obviously, the topic of encrypting ones’ data isn’t nearly as important as it should be. Greenwald said earlier in his discussion that this probably has something to do with the perception that using encryption tools are difficult.

“The barrier most people have when it comes to encryption is more psychological than anything else,” he said.

Recalling a conversation with Snowden about installing encryption tools to communicate, Greenwald said initially he blew Snowden’s suggestion off because he didn’t see the value in it.

“I read the things he was saying and my reaction was, ‘Wow, this is incredibly complex. This is like some difficult outer planet bird language that will take me weeks to master,’” he said.

“And once I actually did it I realized how incredibly easy it is.”

But even though Greenwald doesn’t think U.S. citizens can count on elected officials to help streamline the need for encryption, that doesn’t mean nothing can be done to boost adoption.

“There are definitely strides that the tech community needs to make those tools even more user friendly,” Greenwald said.

http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/10/nsa-views-encryption-as-evidence-of-suspicion-and-will-target-those-who-use-it-security-journalist-says/



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If everything we do on the internet is encrypted then everyone will be suspicious 100% of the time.

Can someone teach me how to make an encrypted server that sends harmless but highly encrypted data to random sources and when the NSA opens them they will be pictures of cats? :D

so we should all start using encrypted VPNs to connect to the web. there are even free ones out there these days. hidemyass, cyberghost etc.

oh and send them to this (http://www.fistofblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/bush-small.jpg), as well as the cats, given the bush's involvement in the intel services.

Does anyone really care what some NSA rumor monger says they might be "wary about?"

There are privacy advocates that are trying to promote encryption tools for everyday use. As they know that the workload on NSA and others will increase and democracy activists and others in dictatorships or elsewhere, will have  a better chance to stay under the radar.

the PGP guy do an effort to promote mundane use of encryption .

My national computer science student's union also have a page with tools and root kit revealers for everyone to stay safe if they choose so.

So what if you attract NSA attention by using encryption? They still have to break it. and getting attention is not the same as committing a crime.

If they want to nail you, they still have to decrypt your content and that is hard.

The only reason they issue such a warning is because they lag behind and scare tactics are a way to have less users drives to crack, by threatening people to self censorship.

I'm wound up now:

Andrea Merkel, being very offended last month over NSA allegedly tapping her phone agrees yesterday to launch development of a 5G cell network with the Brits.

Do she suffer from dementia? How can she not know that British and US intelligence is the same thing?

Our own Prime minister stated 2 months ago, in connection with the Snowden disclosures that "The Danish government didn't have any knowledge of illegal surveillance on Danish citizens". (The Danish press was all over it because of that unintended confession to inviting NSA in).

Our own intelligence is a joke of incompetence spending their time on body guarding right wing extremists, while leaving the intelligence to the US and as a return of favour, Discloses anything the NSA wants to know about Danish citizens.

Fuck I hate this sick world. Good news that people are quite aware of this web of lies and deceit, so it's becoming harder for the undemocratic forces in government every day.

Now the obama's involvement supersedes by tenfold the continuous program from bush.

agreed, it's just that that picture really expresses my opinons of these people very clearly. when i'm feeling polite, anyway. it's a collage, in case you didn't take a close look.

great idea lol

Google "steggo or steganography". For every million dollar security idea there is a $10 countermeasure.   8)

prism break (https://prism-break.org/en/) has loads of good info in regard to privacy and IT security.

tl;dr
nsa nerds need to get some pussy

This is why we need meshnet.

https://projectmeshnet.org/

Every connection is encrypted. The only way to connect to a server insecurely over meshnet is to openly publish your IP and keypair. It also gets rid of ISPs and makes you effectively your own ISP, removing the central points of failure from the internet.

Too bad only like 500 people use it ;_;

Highly disturbing.  But remember: "How could it work any other way?"  Every action has a consequence, and here's the consequence of legitimized coercion; everyone supports the state before it's against them. (http://sites.middlebury.edu/individualandthesociety/files/2010/09/jackson_lottery.pdf)  Can we really complain?

Yes. 

CAUSE
American citizens were consistently told they were not spied on, and the song and dance was about what happened to overseas phone calls, or emails between countries.  The "cover story" is what Snowden tore the lid off.

EFFECT
American citizens show new interest in crypto applications for email, messaging, etc.

2nd EFFECT
NSA warns if you use crypto we will target you.  (comment:  BUT THEY ALREADY WERE!!!)
American citizens seem to have thus been given a choice something like "either low or medium level targeting or high level targeting".

3rd Level EFFECT
...this is going to be a massive outbreak of interest in crypto apps on all sides....

During the panel, Greenwald said the NSA is able to target encrypted communications because so few people actually use encryption tools. That makes the people who are actually trying to stay secure stick out like sore thumbs, thus making it much easier for the agency to focus its efforts on hacking the relatively small bits of encrypted data that they intercept.

If more people would use it, then we would all be better off.
I don't bother  ???

I think I'll take all the spam that comes in to all my email accounts, encrypt it and send it back out.

those NSA circuit breakers gonna blow,...

Lets set up a DHT of auto-responders that encrypt the reply and send to another auto-responder at random.

Oh wait on a large scale that might take down the entire internet unless we rate limit SMTP.

On a forum some years ago, the debate was on fishing emails through Echelon and one guy suggested that everyone had a mail plug-in that randomly appended dangerous keywords, like; bomb, U.S. president, 747 etc. at the end of each email to overload their servers ;)

Back around 1980 Digital Equipment had a satellite link in its internal DECnet engineering network that went from Massachusetts to England. One of the users of this network had a file named keywords.txt that contained suspicious words.  He used a batch job to send this file over the satellite link every night.

Sometime later, DEC was warned that engineering data was probably being stolen off this link by the USSR and that we had best encrypt this, so a link encryption device was added to each end of the link. Incidentally, this DECnet software would probably have come with encryption built in (DES) but that wasn't possible because of the export controls on encryption then in force.


 

You know, 90% of mail is spam now and the internet has absorbed that.  Probably what this means is that it's time for a new email / comm paradimn, one in which there is encryption, some small cost per email, possibly distributed to peer servers eg.  0.01 cent US per email would eliminate spam totally and reward the peer servers.  No commercial data mining on emails possible.

Fix all problems in one giant leap. 

Do not focus just on NSA.  Remember there is FBI, IRS, and all those of foreign countries, plus the domestic despots of klepto krony capitalism:  Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc...

Let them look and see all they want, they will find it boring as hell.....

These people have enough on their plate just shifting through the garbage to get to something real. People think too highly of themselves if they believe their 'precious secrets' are some kind of special things.

Typically childish mentality right there....but you don't even realize it.

You are not the center of the universe......far from it. You are too insignificant for your 'secrets' to matter. Get used to it.

Incorrect. If you have any wealth at all and don't plan to pay the 100% wealth tax coming as socialism falls into its $223 trillion global debt abyss, then you need anonymity when you reveal any information about your wealth.

Ditto incorrect political speech such as what I just wrote. This will get you incarcerated in the future as we descend into another Nazi-like outcome.

I am astounded to find out you think you are not farther ahead of line than me on that account.

LOL

Very worrying but not really surprising >:(