Google's Encryption Plan To Stifle NSA's Dragnet Will Raise the Stakes

CWmike writes "Google's strategy for making surveillance of user Internet activity more difficult for U.S. and foreign governments — started last year, but accelerated in June following the NSA leaks — is as much about economics as data encryption, experts say. Eric Grosse, vice president for security engineering at Google, told The Washington Post: 'It's an arms race.' The crux of the issue with Google making the NSA dragnet harder (knowing if the government wants in, it will get in) is that the NSA evaluates the tactic it uses by weighing the cost with the value of the information obtained. However, the agency does evaluate the tactic it uses by weighing the cost with the value of the information obtained. 'The NSA has turned the fabric of the Internet into a vast surveillance platform, but they are not magical,' Bruce Schneier, a renowned security technologist and cryptographer, wrote in The Guardian. 'They're limited by the same economic realities as the rest of us, and our best defense is to make surveillance of us as expensive as possible.' The NSA's capabilities for cracking encryption are not known outside the agency. However, the most secure part of an encryption system remains the 'mathematics of cryptography,' Schneier said. The greater weaknesses, and the ones mostly likely to be exploited by governments in general, are the systems at the start and end of the data flow. 'I worry a lot more about poorly designed cryptographic products, software bugs, bad passwords, companies that collaborate with the NSA to leak all or part of the keys, and insecure computers and networks.' Is this about citizen's rights, or a business decision (some might say an existential issue) for Google? Does it matter, and will it make a difference?"

Comments

When the comment is filled with shit ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot has become such a pathetic shitty place that even comments do not need to make any sense any longer.

And I will believe that you are so fucking ignorant about international law and what other countries do with their citizens data ...

Raising RED HERRING such as "other countries do with their citizen data" does not, in any way, lessen the CRIME the fucking NSA is perpetrating on the American citizens !

Not to mention the notion of the NSA simply cracking the servers regardless of where they sit ...

NSA simply cracking servers regardless of where they sit ?

Holy motherfucking cucumber !!

I knew NSA has a lot of neat trick, but I never knew NSA is so super powerful that they can simply crack servers regardless of where they sit !!!

Re:I will believe ...

[Dishevel]

I believe that Google already has craploads of servers local to their customers. That is how they work. They have servers in America for ... Americans. They have them in Europe and many other places as well.

Only a fucking third world shithead pretending to be second world thinks America has no place in the world. Fuck off and go live in North Korea.