RSA 2014: Bruce Schneier champions encryption in 'golden age' of government surveillance
Schneier has been a fierce critic of the National Security Agency (NSA) ever since the details of this surveillance were first revealed by former CIA contractor Edward Snowden last summer. And following on from an interview with CNN this week where he argued for the NSA to be split up, he took the opportunity to champion for stronger encryption in front of a packed audience at the RSA Conference.
Schneier, who left BT – also reportedly offering back doors in products – to join Co3 Systems in December, mused from the beginning that the talk was going to be a prickly and hotly-contested subject. “This will be a fun topic."
His talk was entitled "NSA Surveillance: What we know and what to do about it" and he first ran into the attack techniques – sometimes obscured by odd code names – being used by the NSA and GCHQ to carry out mass surveillance. Some of the attacks, he said, included DNS injection, while other NSA programs were able to deanonymise cookies and identify users and their internet browsing habits. He continued that the NSA revelations show that AirGap – where PCs are disconnected from the Internet – “doesn't work” and paid particular attention to ‘Project Bullrun', the clandestine, highly-classified decryption NSA program.
