Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com
The NSA has surreptitiously succeeded in unscrambling encryption that protects people’s privacy online, the New York Times reports.
It’s the latest discovery from documents leaked by NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
According to the Times, the NSA has been able to undermine coding to access information ranging from personal e-mails to medical records.
The NSA used supercomputers, technical trickery and old-fashion persuasion, the Times wrote.
“For the past decade, N.S.A. has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies,” said a 2010 memo about NSDA accomplishments for employees of its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. “Cryptanalytic capabilities are now coming online. Vast amounts of encrypted Internet data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable.”
