Google Speeding Up New Encryption Project After Latest Snowden Leaks

coolnumbr12 writes "In a new leak published by the Guardian, New York Times and ProPublica, Edward Snowden revealed new secret programs by the NSA and GCHQ to decrypt programs designed to keep information private online. In response to NSA's Bullrun and GCHQ's Edgehill, Google said it has accelerated efforts to build new encryption software that is impenetrable to the government agencies. Google has not provided details on its new encryption efforts, but did say it would be 'end-to-end,' meaning that all servers and fiber-optic lines involved in delivering information will be encrypted."

Comments

Re:Meaningless ...

[Xest]

Not really meaningless.

The problem is that the NSA/GCHQ have been farming literally everything that goes in and out of these companies whether it's relevant to their investigations or not. If Google succeed in implementing end-to-end encryption then they wont be able to do this.

Yes you're right they can still walk through the door with a warrant and demand the key but that forces them to be far more targeted in their investigations. It means they have to be able to justify, even if only to a secret court, that the person in question should have a warrant served against their data.

If nothing else that means no more "accidental" gathering of the data of Americans in breach of the 4th amendment. It also means the NSA can no longer rely on GCHQ to gather data on US citizens to bypass the 4th amendment because GCHQ doesn't get to use America's secret courts to serve warrants on US citizens, and nor do we have secret courts in the UK through which it could do it.

So this sort of thing does matter. It matters in that at least the spying they do is all logged down on paper somewhere and has to be justified to at least some degree rather than done automatically against everyone with fuck all oversight.

It's far from perfect, but at least Google are trying to do something and it's better than the current status quo.

Google, Money, Mouth

[Greyfox]

If Google wanted to impress me, they'd include a spot to paste a GPG public key in gmail and auto-encrypt all mails with it on the client side for gmail users or at the entry point of their network for all other mail users. As it stands Google is very much part of the problem, not very much part of the solution.