EMC-owned RSA Security has denied reports that the company had entered into secret contracts with the NSA worth $10 million to use the flaws Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator (Dual_EC_DRBG) as the default pseudorandom number generator for the company's encryptions products.
The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) paid US$10 million to vendor RSA in a "secret" deal to incorporate a deliberately flawed encryption algorithm into widely used security software, according to a Reuters report that is reigniting controversy about the government's involvement in setting security standards.
The contract was part of an NSA campaign to weaken encryption standards in order to aid the agency's surveillance programs, Reuters reported on Friday.
This weekend, the US government filed documents in two long-running cases (both in California's Northern District) related to NSA surveillance.
A U.S. National Security Agency surveillance review board report, to be released Wednesday, will recommend major changes in the way the agency tracks terrorism suspects, according to news reports.
The review board, appointed by President Barack Obama, will recommend that the NSA no longer hold a huge database of U.S. telephone records collected by the NSA, according to the Washington Post. The phone records should be held by the telecom carriers or by a third party, the board recommended, according to the Post.
It's no surprise that the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal would be apologists for the surveillance state, but even they have reached new depths in discussing the recommendations to President Obama from his NSA review panel/task force.
A pension investment group has sued IBM, claiming that the company failed to warn investors that sales in China would slow dramatically following revelations that IBM was helping the U.S. National Security Agency spy on the Chinese.
A federal judge in Washington ruled on Monday that the bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records by the National Security Agency is likely to violate the US constitution, in the most significant legal setback for the agency since the publication of the first surveillance disclosures by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Well, don’t we feel just a little bit ashamed today. While we’ve been whining about trivia like the frightening scope of the NSA’s domestic spying programs – scooping up all our cell phone records, wiretapping American tech companies – the criminally poor oversight provided by rubber stamp lawmakers, and the flagrant lies of top level spooks like DNI James Clapper, the poor misunderstood folks at Ft. Meade have been quietly saving each and one of us from a Chinese plot to destroy all of our computers. Every last one of them.
American intelligence and law enforcement investigators have concluded that they may never know the entirety of what the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden extracted from classified government computers before leaving the United States, according to senior government officials.
Critics of the U.S. National Security Agency’s bulk collection of U.S. residents’ telephone records should offer a better way to track terrorists and protect the country against attacks, the agency’s director said Wednesday.
The NSA’s bulk collection of U.S. telephone records is the “least intrusive” way to track suspected terrorists’ communications with people in the U.S., General Keith Alexander said, defending the NSA’s mass data collection and surveillance programs to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.
