Submitted by The new head of GCHQ [Britain’s NSA], Robert Hannigan, has spoken out strongly against American Internet companies. The BBC reports: “His concerns appear to be twofold. Firstly the fact that militant organisations such as Islamic State (IS) are using Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp to promote themselves and the increasing sophistication that extremists are showing in their use of such platforms. And secondly he is not happy about pledges from Microsoft, Google, Apple and Yahoo to make encryption a default option to protect users from government snooping.”
Naturally, no acknowledgement of the roles of GCHQ and NSA in this. If they hadn’t abused the powers they had, and indeed gone beyond them, maybe these companies wouldn’t have felt it necessary to improve their systems by employing encryption-by-default.
I’m aware they request openess for citizens’ life and privacy. I’d like to request it for our elected politics.
Nope ? So don’t count me in.
Kochise
I feel I should point out that the headline I submitted for this piece was something like;
… Which is reads better, is slightly less inflammatory and is a quote from the BBC article. I used double quotes, so maybe submission stripped that bit out.
How about a third option?
GCHQ: “Waaaah! Waaaaaah! Waaaaaaaaaaaah!!!” (I feel it summarises their opinions nice and succinctly, don’t you?)
Depend, UK would be more like “Would you kindly open your secret to us (otherwise we’ll break your kneecaps)” when US would imprison you in orange for years without telling you what’s going on only to have the UNO delivers you after years because you were in fact innocent.
News coverage between UK and US : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAz-F1QnyCk
Kochise
Thanks for noticing that. I updated the title.
Santa Clause was arrested by the GCHQ today because he supplied presents to terrorists. When asked for his motivation to do so he said “I couldn’t distinguish those 2 people among the other 25 millions that live in the UK. When he asked how the GCHQ knew that these people were terrorists he heard that “they have a lock on their door, so they must be terrorists”
Nope… No no no….
That should have been more like: “They, who do not have any cloud storage, MUST be terrorist. Of course.”
Other than that, I totally agree with you.
Do we think that just because information is encrypted on your local device that it wont’ also be hosted (is still encrypted) on servers? Of course it will. And of course these companies will continue to comply with the court orders (see rubber stamps) that have them turn this data over.
This is nothing more than public complaining by these sorts of agencies to give foreign nations and consumers the false impression that these policies protect their data from US and British intelligence snooping. It’s a conscious ploy to help western businesses, and nothing more.
By weakening cryptographic software, exploiting security weaknesses instead of responsibly disclosing them to authors, by not acting to promote a culture of security and pervasive encryption, all these goverment agencies are helping terrorists, traffickers, thielves.
How can you accuse China of stealing technology if you deliberately undermine your country’s security ?
Morons.
Did they ever think that these groups’ presence on social media presents an opportunity to infiltrate these groups?
Or do they just want to do as little groundwork intelligence as possible and work purely behind computers and get a false sense of security?
Translation:
Dear Idiot Terrorists,
please continue to use Twitter, Google and Facebook to share your most important secrets. These sites are actually intelligence gathering fronts for the NSA and CIA.
The so-called encryption is merely a ploy to lure you into a false sense of security.
Yours Sincerely.
GCHQ.
Edited 2014-11-06 00:36 UTC
Honeypots !