Back in the 1990s, security researchers and privacy watchdogs
were alarmed by government demands that hardware and software firms
build “backdoors” into their products, the millions of personal
computers and cell phones propelling communication flows along the
now-quaint “information superhighway.”
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| London in 1984, as described by Novelist George Orwell. (Illustration: Anton Raath) |
By
Tom Burghardt
Global Research, November 10, 2013
Never mind that the same factory-installed kit that allowed secret
state agencies to troll through private communications also served as a
discrete portal for criminal gangs to loot your bank account or steal
your identity.
To make matters worse, instead of the accountability promised the
American people by Congress in the wake of the Watergate scandal,
successive US administrations have worked assiduously to erect an
impenetrable secrecy regime backstopped by secret laws overseen by
secret courts which operate on the basis of secret administrative
subpoenas, latter day
lettres de cachet.
But now that all their dirty secrets are popping out of Edward
Snowden’s “bottomless briefcase,” we also know the “Crypto Wars” of the
1990s never ended.
Documents published by
The Guardian and
The New York Times
revealed that the National Security Agency “actively engages the US and
IT industries” and has “broadly compromised the guarantees that
internet companies have given consumers to reassure them that their
communications, online banking and medical records would be
indecipherable to criminals or governments.”
“Those methods include covert measures to ensure NSA control over setting of international encryption standards,” The Guardian
disclosed, along with “the use of supercomputers to break encryption
with ‘brute force’, and–the most closely guarded secret of
all–collaboration with technology companies and internet service
providers themselves.”
According to
The New York Times, NSA “had found ways inside
some of the encryption chips that scramble information for businesses
and governments, either by working with chipmakers to insert back doors
or by surreptitiously exploiting existing security flaws, according to
the documents.”
In fact, “vulnerabilities” inserted “into commercial encryption
systems” would be known to NSA alone. Everyone else, including
commercial customers, are referred to in the documents as “adversaries.”
The cover name for this program is
Project BULLRUN.
An agency classification guide asserts that “Project BULLRUN deals with
NSA’s abilities to defeat the encryption used in specific network
communication technologies. BULLRUN involves multiple sources, all of
which are extremely sensitive. They include CNE [computer network
exploitation], interdiction, industry relationships, collaboration with
other IC entities, and advanced mathematical techniques.”
