Exactly four weeks ago, President Obama stood before the White House press corps and assured them that the NSA’s surveillance practices weren’t so troubling after all.
“I’m comfortable that if the American people examined exactly what was taking place, how it was being used, what the safeguards were, that they would say, you know what, these folks are following the law and doing what they say they’re doing,” he said. However, to put the public further at ease, he proposed some modest new oversight measures, and gave some tips about how the American people could better safeguard their own privacy.
“As technology develops further, technology itself may provide us some additional safeguards,” said the president. “So for example, if people don’t have confidence that the law, the checks and balances of the court and Congress, are sufficient to give us confidence that government’s not snooping, well, maybe we can embed technologies in there that prevent the snooping regardless of what government wants to do. I mean, there may be some technological fixes that provide another layer of assurance.”
What the president didn’t mention is that the National Security Agency has been working to undermine those “technological fixes” for over a decade.
Since 2000, the NSA has been “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 a new report from ProPublica, The New York Times and the Guardian. Billions of dollars have been spent on cracking private companies’ encryption methods and “deliberately weakening the international encryption standards adopted by developers.” What’s more, the agency has reportedly partnered with corporations such as Microsoft to gain backdoor access to the companies’ products, according to The Guardian.









