October 31, 2013
Why the NSA loves the one-security-model HTTPS fanaticism of the Internet
Of all the things I have written about the traps in the HTTPS model for security, this one diagram lays it out so well, I'm left in the dirt. Presented with little comment:
The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials.
By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot.
Read all of the stories in The Washington Post's ongoing coverage of the National Security Agency's surveillance programs.
According to a top-secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, the NSA's acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from internal Yahoo and Google networks to data warehouses at the agency's headquarters at Fort Meade, Md. In the preceding 30 days, the report said, field collectors had processed and sent back 181,280,466 new records -- including "metadata," which would indicate who sent or received e-mails and when, as well as content such as text, audio and video.
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Posted by iang at October 31, 2013 04:54 AM | TrackBack