Google says %$#%^&&^!! to the NSA
Posted by: Timothy Weaver on 11/08/2013 11:52 AM
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Indignation runs deep over the revelation of the NSA spying on Google and Yahoo. in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Google's executive chairman referred to the NSA's surveillance of its data center as "outrageous." Google engineer Mike Hearn went a tad further.
I've spent the last ten years of my life trying to keep Google's users safe and secure from the many diverse threats Google faces.
I've seen armies of machines DOS-ing Google. I've seen worms DOS'ing Google to find vulnerabilities in other people's software. I've seen criminal gangs figure out malware. I've seen spyware masquerading as toolbars so thick it breaks computers because it interferes with the other spyware.
I've even seen oppressive governments use state sponsored hacking to target dissidents.
But after spending all that time helping in my tiny way to protect Google - one of the greatest things to arise from the internet - seeing this, well, it's just a little like coming home from War with Sauron, destroying the One Ring, only to discover the NSA is on the front porch of the Shire chopping down the Party Tree and outsourcing all the hobbit farmers with half-orcs and whips.
The US has to be better than this; but I guess in the interim, that security job is looking a lot more like a Sisyphus thing than ever.
Hearn backed up his colleague:
I now join him in issuing a giant [expletive] to the people who made these slides. I am not American, I am a Brit, but it's no different - GCHQ turns out to be even worse than the NSA.
We designed this system to keep criminals out . There's no ambiguity here. The warrant system with skeptical judges, paths for appeal, and rules of evidence was built from centuries of hard won experience. When it works, it represents as good a balance as we've got between the need to restrain the state and the need to keep crime in check. Bypassing that system is illegal for a good reason .
Unfortunately we live in a world where all too often, laws are for the little people. Nobody at GCHQ or the NSA will ever stand before a judge and answer for this industrial-scale subversion of the judicial process. In the absence of working law enforcement, we therefore do what internet engineers have always done - build more secure software. The traffic shown in the slides below is now all encrypted and the work the NSA/GCHQ staff did on understanding it, ruined.
Thank you Edward Snowden. For me personally, this is the most interesting revelation all summer.
I've spent the last ten years of my life trying to keep Google's users safe and secure from the many diverse threats Google faces.
I've seen armies of machines DOS-ing Google. I've seen worms DOS'ing Google to find vulnerabilities in other people's software. I've seen criminal gangs figure out malware. I've seen spyware masquerading as toolbars so thick it breaks computers because it interferes with the other spyware.
I've even seen oppressive governments use state sponsored hacking to target dissidents.
But after spending all that time helping in my tiny way to protect Google - one of the greatest things to arise from the internet - seeing this, well, it's just a little like coming home from War with Sauron, destroying the One Ring, only to discover the NSA is on the front porch of the Shire chopping down the Party Tree and outsourcing all the hobbit farmers with half-orcs and whips.
The US has to be better than this; but I guess in the interim, that security job is looking a lot more like a Sisyphus thing than ever.
Hearn backed up his colleague:
I now join him in issuing a giant [expletive] to the people who made these slides. I am not American, I am a Brit, but it's no different - GCHQ turns out to be even worse than the NSA.
We designed this system to keep criminals out . There's no ambiguity here. The warrant system with skeptical judges, paths for appeal, and rules of evidence was built from centuries of hard won experience. When it works, it represents as good a balance as we've got between the need to restrain the state and the need to keep crime in check. Bypassing that system is illegal for a good reason .
Unfortunately we live in a world where all too often, laws are for the little people. Nobody at GCHQ or the NSA will ever stand before a judge and answer for this industrial-scale subversion of the judicial process. In the absence of working law enforcement, we therefore do what internet engineers have always done - build more secure software. The traffic shown in the slides below is now all encrypted and the work the NSA/GCHQ staff did on understanding it, ruined.
Thank you Edward Snowden. For me personally, this is the most interesting revelation all summer.
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