Timothy H. Edgar

Me: “I'm pretty skeptical of the scope of surveillance being described here. As a Unix guru myself who implements web technologies, I know a little something about what this would require. In order for the NSA to get back-doors into all these servers they would have to have the full assistance of all these companies, and every time the company wanted to update its storage or servers or code they would need to maintain the backdoors as well. Alternatively, they would need to give all the digital keys and complete access to the servers to the NSA, which they are not going to do. As for services like DropBox, they actually don't have access to the data that you store on their servers. They only have an encrypted copy of your data, which they can't decrypt on their own. In order to encrypt and decrypt the data in your DropBox your computer uses a private key that DropBox (the company) doesn't have. The encryption of these files is strong enough (2048 bit) to thwart the government's efforts to decrypt them. As for your Facebook and email communications, the story is similar. The data may not be encrypted, but it's always transferred over an HTTPS connection, so it's safe in transit in both directions. The NSA would have to have direct access to Google's and Facebook's servers and a dedicated team at each of those companies to keep their accesspoints updated for every change. That's just so unlikely to be the case. But let's wait and see where this purported leak takes us…”

Sceptic: “Wouldn't they just ask Verizon, AT&T, Level 3, Google, Facebook, and other telecommunications providers to pipe them a copy of the data going to the server farm and of course the key generation system so they can decrypt your 2048 bit files?”… (más)