11–20 of 51 posts
This being more or less the entire stated mission of GCHQ, I wonder who's actually surprised by this revelation.
I think people are more surprised that their own traffic is falling into this and not just diplomatic/military signals. But that's one of the unintended consequences of communications in general shifting over to Internet methods instead of dedicated circuits.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not by default on every account. I have recently changed settings on couple of my friends account to force SSL.
What is the current understanding regarding the crackability of SSL?
In short, nothing is safe anymore.
(http://www.gchq-careers.co.uk/about-gchq/about-gchq/)
> As one of the UK's intelligence and security agencies, we gather and analyse digital and electronic signals from many channels, from all corners of the world. Converting this information into intelligence material, we play a significant role in informing national security, military operations, police activity and foreign policy.
Since this is part of GCHQ's mission, and publicly declared on their recruitment website, it shouldn't be that surprising. ( http://www.gchq-careers.co.uk/about-gchq/about-gchq/ ) > As one of the UK's intelligence and security agencies, we gather and analyse digital and electronic signals from many channels, from all corners of the world. Converting this information into intelligence material, we play a significant r…
This being more or less the entire stated mission of GCHQ, I wonder who's actually surprised by this revelation.
"This includes recordings of phone calls, the content of email messages, entries on Facebook and the history of any internet user's access to websites – all of which is deemed legal, even though the warrant system was supposed to limit interception to a specified range of targets....
By May last year 300 analysts from GCHQ, and 250 from the NSA, had been assigned to sift through the flood of data."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the current understanding regarding the crackability of SSL?
The encryption (if implemented correctly) is good, but if an intelligence agency has access to a Certificate Authority, or the target of your communications, man-in-the-middle attacks are feasible. In short, nothing is safe anymore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not by default on every account. I have recently changed settings on couple of my friends account to force SSL.
What is the current understanding regarding the crackability of SSL?
SSL can be broken in myriad of different ways but at least in these two scenarios you are to certain degree safe
This being more or less the entire stated mission of GCHQ, I wonder who's actually surprised by this revelation.
This being more or less the entire stated mission of GCHQ, I wonder who's actually surprised by this revelation.
Yes but one month ago they still had plausible deniability, not anymore. In short the term it may change nothing but in the long run it will have an impact, no doubt.
Can we just resolve this right here? The Internet backbone is tapped. To whatever extent NSA isn't looking at our traffic (or is pretending not to, or pantomiming not doing it), some other foreign SIGINT agency is.
To believe otherwise is to believe that state-sponsored intelligence agencies somehow believe the Internet is off limits to surveillance because I don't know freedom and progress or something. Of course they don't believe that.
This being more or less the entire stated mission of GCHQ, I wonder who's actually surprised by this revelation.
In the late 1990s I worked for the UK subsidiary of a large US defence contractor. They had an international network which connected their subsidiaries to transfer documents, emails and engineering drawings. Most work was done for the US DoD. This was a typical leased ISDN system from BT.
It had cryptos at each end of a link (each in a literally a 2m by 2m room declared US soil by the then home secretary).
The biggest threat vector they had was actually listed as GCHQ and the line would suspiciously go down occasionally for a few ms resulting in the cryptos being "red buttoned" (key erasure).
A telling tale if any.