The 13 Best Pinterest Boards for Learning About report phone encryption deliberately weakened
The NSA’s surveillance has made it clear to many that their phone calls and email are being monitored: The National Security Agency’s secret “backdoor.
The NSA’s backdoor, which lets them read your calls and emails and intercept your calls and email, was revealed in a leaked phone conversation with Rep. Mike Rogers. Rogers was the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which is currently investigating the NSA’s surveillance program. It’s not just his committee. There are many investigations in Congress right now.
The reason behind the NSAs backdoor is that, in order to protect privacy, the NSA has to keep listening to your phone calls. The NSA calls what they do “surveillance.” You see, the NSA doesn’t have this program solely for the purpose of spying on you and listening to your email.
The NSA does, however, spy on everyone they can regardless of what they do and what you do, so in order for NSA to be able to listen to what your phone calls are saying, they need to be in control of your phone calls. Any other way would just be too big of a security hole.
The NSA also has access to the encrypted voice communications from your cell phone, so they can listen in to this connection. The government uses this to search your emails for all kinds of things, like your phone numbers, social security numbers, birth dates, phone numbers, and more. This is called Echelon, and it’s used by the NSA to spy on everyone’s every call. So as a result, the NSA has to keep listening to your phone calls.
For privacy, many people use encryption to hide their phone numbers and other personal information from the government. This is called phone encryption, and is pretty effective, although some people have tried to circumvent this by using it on their own phones.
I don’t know about you, but as long as I’m on my phone with someone I don’t know and I know how to use encryption, that person can’t really be eavesdropping on my conversations. It’s just that it’s in my best interest to make sure this doesn’t happen.
The NSA recently revealed what they can do to phone encryption: they can make it more difficult to intercept a phone call. Although I’m not convinced that’s what happened here, it is still a bit creepy that the government is more concerned with security than privacy.
The NSA can do this because they are the government. The phone companies also are the government, but since they are a private company they have to deal with all the same things as the government, and they have to get their hands dirty every time the government wants to weaken their privacy. This is why they can do it, because they are also the ones who make sure that it doesn’t happen.
Now that they have the NSA, the phone companies (all of us) are now the government, because they have to keep the government from spying on us. The government has no interest in making sure that our phone calls are private, or our mail is secure. It doesn’t matter if it is, because it doesn’t need to be.