A few days back, Charles Stross pointed out one of the most ironic points of interest in the NSA scandal … they did it to themselves, over the course of several years effort:
I don’t need to tell you about the global surveillance disclosures of 2013 to the present — it’s no exaggeration to call them the biggest secret intelligence leak in history, a monumental gaffe (from the perspective of the espionage-industrial complex) and a security officer’s worst nightmare.
But it occurs to me that it’s worth pointing out that the NSA set themselves up for it by preventing the early internet specifications from including transport layer encryption.
At every step in the development of the public internet the NSA systematically lobbied for weaker security, to enhance their own information-gathering capabilities. The trouble is, the success of the internet protocols created a networking monoculture that the NSA themselves came to rely on for their internal infrastructure. The same security holes that the NSA relied on to gain access to your (or Osama bin Laden’s) email allowed gangsters to steal passwords and login credentials and credit card numbers. And ultimately these same baked-in security holes allowed Edward Snowden — who, let us remember, is merely one guy: a talented system administrator and programmer, but no Clark Kent — to rampage through their internal information systems.
The moral of the story is clear: be very cautious about poisoning the banquet you serve your guests, lest you end up accidentally ingesting it yourself.
