NSA has cracked most encryption: reports
11 Sep 2013
The National Security Agency, in a joint effort with the UK government, had secretly been unraveling encryption technology that billions of internet users relied upon to keep their electronic messages and confidential data safe from prying eyes, according to published reports Thursday based on internal US government documents.
The NSA had bypassed or altogether cracked much of the digital encryption used by businesses and everyday web users, according to reports in The New York Times, The Guardian newspaper as also the nonprofit news website ProPublica.
The reports described the NSA's investment amounting to billions of dollars since 2000 to make nearly everyone's secrets available for government consumption.
To help drive the effort the NSA had built powerful supercomputers to break encryption codes and partnered with unnamed technology companies to insert "back doors" into their software, according to the reports.
The government would gain access to users' digital information before it was encrypted and sent over the internet with the practice.
"For the past decade, NSA has led an aggressive, multi-pronged effort to break widely used internet encryption technologies," a 2010 briefing document reports about the NSA's accomplishments meant for its UK counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ.
According to security experts who spoke to the news organisations, a code-breaking practice of the kind would ultimately undermine internet security and leave everyday web users vulnerable to hackers.
Commentators say the assurance given by US officials on 30 August that its Department of Defence did not ''engage in economic espionage in any domain, including cyber'' sounded hollow, as it was revealed that the NSA attacked the internal computers of Petrobras, the Brazilian oil giant, as part of a programme that also targeted foreign government networks, airlines, energy companies and financial organisations.
Britain's GCHQ, even targeted the secure international lines over which people conducted their financial transactions on automatic teller machines (ATMs).
Guardian journalist, Glenn Greenwald, who published top secret documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, said in a report for Globo TV on Sunday night that the name of Petrobras appeared on several slides of a training programme for new agents.
The documents showed that the targeted companies were monitored by interception of all communications and IP addresses and identification of each computer on the network.
After the revelation last week that the NSA had targeted personal phones and emails of president Dilma Rousseff, Brazilian officials suspected that the spying was linked to the auction of the country's oil deposits.
Brazil's so-called sub-salt polygon, where many of the finds had been discovered, might contain as much as 100 billion barrels of oil, with one find alone, the giant Libra field, estimated to hold reserves of up to 12 billion barrels of oil, which was enough to supply all US oil needs for two years.
