"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true!"
-Homer J. Simpson

Saturday, December 29, 2007

The NSA has alwas been horrible for eavesdropping

An interesting story here


For decades, the US National Security Agency (NSA) has been reading effortlessly ultra sensitive messages intercepted from all parts of the world. This extraordinary feat was not the consequence of the work of some genius cyber mathematician. Nor was it the result of the agency dominance in the field of super computers, which allegedly have outpaced their most direct rivals by orders of magnitude. The truth is far simpler and quite troubling. The game was rigged.
This is a classic example of why single-source encryption should not be trusted:

A decade after the end of WWII, the NSA, also known as No Such Agency, had rigged the Crypto AG machines in various ways according to the targeted countries. It is probably no exaggeration to state that this 20th century version of the "Trojan horse" is quite likely the greatest sting in modern history.