NSA

Matthew Green is a well-known cryptography professor, currently teaching in the computer science department of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Last week, Green authored a long and interesting blog post about the recent revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA) has, among much else, subverted crypto standards. In his words, "The TL;DR ['too long; didn't read' version] is that the NSA has been doing some very bad things." And Green went on to speculate at some length about what those "bad things" were and what they might mean.

Gen. Keith Alexander, the director of the National Security Agency (NSA), is no longer expected to keynote a cyber security conference scheduled to convene on Tuesday.

On Monday, KPN, the Dutch telecommunications company that is hosting the “Masters in Security” congress, announced the news on its website.

The change in plans came just days after major media outlets published documents, leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, which revealed details on NSA's years-long mission to undermine encryption methods widely used to secure communications sent over the internet.

The ongoing revelations about NSA snoopery have prompted The Chocolate Factory to accelerate its effort to encrypt user data at every possible point.

Mountain View had already announced that its Google Cloud Storage platform was adding server-side encryption to reassure users. User data uploaded to the service is now being encrypted using AES-128 in RAM before being written to disk.

Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all filed petitions Monday with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as part of a renewed effort to reveal more information about government data requests.

The companies had already petitioned the U.S. government to let them be more specific in reporting the volume of national security-related requests they receive, following the first leaks in June about government surveillance programs such as Prism.

The companies said Monday they are pushing harder now because those previous efforts did not pay off.

"We want to be really, really clear that whenever you give us information, we're going to take it."

These aren't the words of some suede-shoed government spy, trying to put an honest face on an inherently sneaky job.

Thursday's revelation that US and British intelligence agencies are able to decode most Internet traffic was a transforming moment for many, akin to getting definitive proof of intelligent extraterrestrial life. It fundamentally changed the assumptions that many of us have about the tools hundreds of millions of people rely on to shield their most private information from prying eyes. And it challenged the trust placed in the people who build and provide those tools.

Six years ago, two Microsoft cryptography researchers discovered some weirdness in an obscure cryptography standard authored by the National Security Agency. There was a bug in a government-standard random number generator that could be used to encrypt data.

The researchers, Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson, found that the number generator appeared to have been built with a backdoor — it came with a secret numeric key that could allow a third party to decrypt code that it helped generate.

It was only a matter of time before we learned that the NSA has managed to thwart much of the encryption that protects telephone and online communication, but new revelations show the extent to which the agency, and Britain’s GCHQ, have gone to systematically undermine encryption.

Leaks by a fugitive US intelligence contractor have damaged Britain's national security, and the data he gave journalists includes information that might expose the identities of British spies, a government official told the High Court in London.

The official said Brazilian David Miranda, the partner of a Guardian newspaper journalist, was carrying a computer hard-drive containing 58,000 highly classified intelligence documents when he was detained at Heathrow airport earlier this month.

Microsoft and Google may sue US government to allow them to publish user data request from the government after talks with the Justice Department stalled.

The tech giants filed suits in a US federal court in June, arguing a right to make public more information about user data requests made under the auspices of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The technology giants agreed six times to extend the deadline for the government to respond to the lawsuits, the Microsoft's general counsel, Brad Smith, wrote in a blog post.