Posted on 09/05/2013 12:14:05 PM PDT by Alter Kaker
The National Security Agency is winning its long-running secret war on encryption, using supercomputers, technical trickery, court orders and behind-the-scenes persuasion to undermine the major tools protecting the privacy of everyday communications in the Internet age, according to newly disclosed documents.
The agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, the documents show.
Many users assume — or have been assured by Internet companies — that their data is safe from prying eyes, including those of the government, and the N.S.A. wants to keep it that way. The agency treats its recent successes in deciphering protected information as among its most closely guarded secrets, restricted to those cleared for a highly classified program code-named Bullrun, according to the documents, provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Use cash at a small business.
Their videotapes aren’t recorded and stored forever in some central database in NW Arkansas...
ping
What the password-guessing program does is take your personal information, like birthdays, phone numbers, street address, girlfriends and combines it into various strong passwords that you might have used.
For example, if you are Joe Blow of 486 Main Street, Anytown, Illinois 60823, and you girlfriend is Doris and you dog is Spike, it will try stuff like
doris60823spike
spike486doris
illiniDoris60823spike
...and so on. It can do thousands of combinations a second. They get hits about 25-30% of the time.
I was speaking to some twenty-somethings about the NSA spying and they were nonplussed about the whole thing. It’s terrible. Government schools have raised pro-government drones.
Yep, we’ve forgotten that when the come for X, eventually they come for you.
UNBELIEVABLE YES
Perhaps Mr Snowden is not what he appears to be?
Yep. They have created a generation of mindless sheeple
Great. Just great!
FWIW my credit union just called and said Visa had notified them my debit card was on a list that had been hacked. But nothing appears to be missing. And they are sending me a new card.
We need to shut this shit down or we are slaves, and our futures is the ovens.
Well, they do now!
Any encryption scheme merely delays and increases the effort needed to read a message. That should be well understood by anyone who uses any encryption scheme. In some ways encryption makes your communications more vulnerable as attention tends to be focused on encrypted messages, rather than the vast number of clear text messages.
Of course the best way to keep your message safe is to use a one time use code, not a repeated cipher.
The other thing that protects your messages is the provision of vast amounts of false information with similar cipher techniques to those used with your true information. To work best, this is done with a plan as to the false ideas you want your enemy to think is true, and the true ideas you want your enemy not to know.
During WWII Germany tried to present an image of great strength, so enemies would be discouraged. They sought to plant the notion that they were manufacturing 1400 tanks a month.
Analysis of a few captured tanks in north Africa put the lie to that. The serial numbers were collected and seemed to all be very close together. Analysis of castings showed that the parts came from a small number of masters, and that put an upper limit on the rate of manufacture.
For people who seek to look behind the lies disseminated by propagandists, there is a good Wikipedia article on “The German Tank Problem”.
At least we have one section of the government that listens to us!
To all Freepers; Get some kind of encryption software for your email. Send 50 emails a day with a single message: “Drink more Ovaltine.”
I’m going to use those three passwords next time some stoopid site wants one:)
It’s always been a race, someone comes up with a way of protecting something and then someone that wants that comes up with a way to crack that protection. The NSA has been doing what governments always do which is to constantly seek power and advantage. SSL and VPN’s are mostly based on public key cryptography that is old and in dire need of replacement and has been known to be vulnerable for some time. Even the newer public key algorithms are not anywhere near as good as AES so don’t expect any of them to provide protection against any government because they won’t.
The distressing thing is not that we are vulnerable but that the USG has bought and paid for so many technology companies and service providers that the encryption methods have become moot because they are using back doors to suck up everything before the data hits any encryption device. We’ve been sold out by Facebook, Goggle, Yahoo, Microsoft, Verizon, AT&T, etc.
Snowden did tremendous damage to our countries ability to suck up foreign intelligence and more than likely a lot of damage to the US economy long term as I see most countries moving away from US based suppliers and more towards either open source or suppliers from second and third world (read not China, Russia, UK, etc.). If I was a non-US based company or country I’d certainly be shopping elsewhere now and would imagine that a lot of them are scrambling to do just that.
“And what they can’t break, they record until they can.”
AAMTD SFSF SH%G)E DFWERJPA-id
%&HTJLS: PM. @! RTB..?Q
How does a decrypter know it has been successful? How does it know the difference between gibberish and clear text? It’s a computer program and doesn’t understand anything. Does it look for words like “the” and “bomb”?
Don’t real terrorists use words like “the” and “Package”? Wouldn’t it write in code, like “Aunt Susie is going to deliver the package to New York”
And anyway, why would a true terrorist write in English?
In other words, if the decrypter doesn’t know what it’s looking for, what does it look for?
I would like to know. Not being flippant, for a change.
I use FUB0. They still don’t get it.
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