NSA eavesdropping as business opportunity
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To many Americans, online eavesdropping by the U.S. National Security Agency is an outrage, a threat to privacy and freedom. To some, it’s a business opportunity.
A small but growing number of companies have introduced Internet and communications services designed to shield users from the government’s eyes. A few even advertise their products as “NSA-proof.” Spies are part of their sales pitch.
Cybersecurity fears, of course, didn’t start with Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who in 2013 started leaking details of the agency’s far-reaching surveillance programs.
Many of the companies have been offering encrypted online services for years, scrambling their customers’ data and communications in ways that require the right computer-generated “key” to decode. They are at least as concerned with thwarting private hackers and corporate spies as they are with blocking federal agents. Last week’s disclosure that Russian hackers have amassed 1.2 billion user name and password combinations worldwide was a potent reminder of that threat.
“There is absolutely some level of wishful thinking in any claim that a product is NSA-proof,” said Peter Eckersley, technology projects director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on digital privacy. “It varies from complete and utter fiction to just overconfidence.”
Since the NSA conducts its business in secret, its full capabilities remain a matter of speculation. But a series of revelations that began in 2005 uncovered programs in which the agency routinely collects Internet traffic and telephone records, through which it sifts, looking for patterns that could point to terrorist activities. The agency recently built a massive facility near Salt Lake City to store the data.
Documents leaked by Snowden last year showed that the agency also secretly tapped into the connections linking Google and Yahoo data centers, where the companies route traffic and store data. Both companies expressed outrage and scrambled to protect their data. Google and Yahoo, as well as other Internet companies including Facebook and Microsoft, were already legally required to turn over stored communications and data that the NSA requests on specific users under the agency’s Prism program.
