What does a 12 on a scale of 1 to 10 even mean? What criteria are they judging damages on?
So far, I do not think the NSA has lost any of the capabilities it previously had. I have not heard of any NSA backdoors being removed from existing software.
So far, I do not think the NSA has lost any of the capabilities it previously had. I have not heard of any NSA backdoors being removed from existing software.
They're also an item of debate now, which could potentially result in loss of capability further on. At the next round of elections, Democratic candidates will likely have to defend an unpopular intervention in Syria, they'd rather not add to that pile a defence of some invented Federal right to unwarranted spying on everyone's communications; and it's a potentially easy target for small-government Republicans.
In the bizarre logic of American politics, Republicans and Democrats are both pro-NSA, while the Greens and Libertarians are anti-NSA.
The capability to decrypt everything is largely outside of their control, however they can exert pressure of ISPs, SSL certificate authorities, commercial software vendors, social networking services, and a variety of other organizations.
The rationale being that the US Government pressures those organizations to intentionally implement weaker security measures to facilitate the ongoing capabilities of the government's suspicionless surveillance systems.
Since this system of clandestine supportive relationships is potentially unreliable (since it is directly outside of their control and it relies on reciprocal partnerships) then it stands to reason that the simply revelation of these relationships could jeopardize the US Government's surveillance capabilities.
[1]http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/130711/kremlin-t...
I think the rest of the article is hyperbole too, but not much more than that.
> Nonetheless, this is truly information that plenty of bad guys probably didn't know, and probably didn't have much of an inkling about. It's likely that many or most of them figured that ordinary commercial crypto provided sufficient protection ...
> Now every bad guy in the world knows for a fact that commercial crypto won't help them, and the ones with even modest smarts will switch to strong crypto techniques that remain unbreakable.
If you accept that most bad guys were using commercial crypto and not strong crypto, NSA may have been tapping communications but now won't be able to
Integer overflow!
This one doesn't just go to eleven. Twelve is greater than eleven.