Crypto 'Front Door' Debate Likely to Go On For Years

SAN FRANCISCO–Encryption is the hot new topic in security at the moment, as it has been any number of times in the last few decades. And, as in the past, the notions of key escrow, mandated legal access to encrypted systems and other ideas for helping governments defeat cryptosystems have followe...

Little Change in Online Behavior Following Snowden Revelations

Some 30 percent of American adults say they have altered their digital behavior in the wake of Edward Snowden’s NSA spying revelations in order to hide information from the government. In Spring 2013, Snowden, a then NSA contractor working for Booz Allen Hamilton, remotely accessed the NSA’s Ft...

New Mozilla Privacy Initiative to Include High-Capacity Tor Relays

Mozilla is starting a new initiative that the company says is designed to incorporate more privacy enhancing features into Firefox and the other Mozilla products. The project, known as Polaris, involves collaboration with The Tor Project and the Center for Democracy and Technology and will involv...

In the Wake of the Snowden Revelations, A Wave of Innovation

It was an absurd scene. Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA and a four-star general in the Army, stood alone on the stage, squinting through the floodlights as members of the standing-room-only crowd shouted insults and accusations. Armed men in dark suits roamed the area in front of the...

Terrorist Group Al-Qaeda Uses New Encryption Softwares After NSA Revelations

Last year, Just after Snowden leaks, the U.S Government warned that NSA surveillance revelations will make harder to track bad guys trying to harm the United States, as disclosures can be helpful to terrorist groups. In response to the NSA revelations, the terrorists at Al-Qaeda have started usin...

The White House and Zero Day Sleight of Hand

The White House wants you to know that it did not know about the OpenSSL Heartbleed vulnerability before you did. The White House also wants you to know that administration officials don’t think stockpiling zero days isn’t necessarily good for national security. That’s all well and good, except...

Bruce Schneier on Surveillance and Trust

Dennis Fisher talks with Bruce Schneier about the differences between bulk and targeted surveillance, the most concerning NSA revelations and making surveillance more expensive for intelligence agencies. Download: digitalunderground145.mp3...

'Our Threat Model Has Changed'

PUNTA CANA–The golden era of bulk surveillance through the acquisition of phone records and other data from telecommunications companies may already be fading, but the larger threat to privacy and security is just beginning to emerge: the use of legal tools and coercion to get around encryption a...

Former NSA Officials Detail Failures of Agency Programs in Letter to Obama

In the weeks and months leading up to 9/11, the National Security Agency had been working on a new information-gathering and analysis system known as THINTHREAD, a system that was built in-house and was meant to replace the uncountable number of stand-alone collection systems and attendant...

Surveillance Backdoors 'Contribute to Insecurity', Report Says

The existing state of affairs in which government agencies and intelligence services work to insert backdoors into various hardware, software and networks is not only a problem in terms of civil rights but also represents a serious security risk to most users and the Internet itself, a recent...

Lavabit, Silent Circle Form New Anti-Surveillance Dark Mail Alliance

As the stunning revelations about the NSA’s collection methods and capabilities continue to mount, two secure email providers that have shut down their services in recent months have formed a new alliance to develop and deploy a new secure email platform that will be resistant to surveillance and...

The Sky is Not Falling--It's Fallen

It’s no fun being a cynic, thinking that everything is bad and getting worse. It’s easy–especially in the security community–but it’s not fun. But, in light of the latest in the interminable string of revelations about the NSA’s efforts to eat away at the foundation of the security industry, the...

Questions About Crypto Security Follow Latest NSA Revelations

As security experts and cryptographers continue to debate and discuss the implications of the revelations of the NSA’s capabilities against various encryption protocols and systems, some of the larger Internet companies are taking steps to protect their users’ data against the new threat. Google,...