Silicon Valley Nerds Seek Revenge on NSA Spies with Super Coding

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Google Inc., Facebook Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. are fighting back against the National Security Agency by using harder-to-crack code to shield their networks and online customer data from unauthorized U.S. spying.

The companies, burned by disclosures they?ve cooperated with U.S. surveillance programs, are protecting user e-mail and social-media posts with strengthened encryption that the U.S. government says won?t be easily broken until 2030.

 

While the NSA may find ways around the barriers, the companies say they have to assure users their online connections are secure and data can?t be grabbed when transmitted over fiber-optic networks or digitally stored.

Microsoft Corp. is convinced it must ?invest in protecting customers? information from a wide range of threats, which if the allegations are true, include governments,? Matt Thomlinson, general manager of trustworthy computing, said in an e-mail. He didn?t provide details.

Internet companies including Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple Inc. are trying to distance themselves from news reports that they gave the agency data on electronic communications of Americans and foreigners or have lax security.

 

 

While the companies are trying to prevent the NSA from gaining unauthorized access to their data, they say they comply with legal court orders compelling them to provide the government information.

The NSA has tapped fiber-optic cables abroad in order to siphon off data from Google and Yahoo, circumvented or cracked encryption, and covertly introduced weaknesses and back doors into digital coding, according to reports in the Washington Post, the New York Times and the U.K.?s Guardian newspaper based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Companies are fighting back primarily by using increasingly complex encryption, which scrambles data using a mathematical formula that can be decoded only with a special digital key. The idea is to protect sensitive information like e-mails, Internet searches and digital calls.

Google has accelerated efforts to encrypt information flowing between its data centers, doubled the length of its digital keys and implemented measures to detect fraudulent certificates for verifying the authenticity of websites, according to a statement from the Mountain View, California-based company.

NSA spy programs have ?the great potential for doing serious damage to the competitiveness? of U.S. companies, Richard Salgado, Google?s director of law enforcement and information security, told a Senate subcommittee Nov. 13.

 

Forrester Research Inc. analyst James Staten found the U.S. cloud computing industry could lose as much as $180 billion by 2016 due to the spying disclosures.

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[nitins60]

They say so, but no one knows what's the truth n reality.