
 Is the NSA taking over SSL hosting services quietly? - nickb
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/35378/122/
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cperciva
This wouldn't surprise me at all -- the NSA has a large budget, and (now that
strong cryptography is widely available) wants as wide an array of tools as
possible. Buying access to data, stealing it by exploiting security flaws in
software, snooping on it via EM emissions, obtaining encryption keys via side
channel attacks, and (with the assistance of the CIA and/or FBI) capturing
passphrases using keyloggers are all techniques which the NSA is believed to
have used in the past.

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tptacek
So is there a post somewhere with actual evidence? Or is it equally likely
that the aliens in the employ of the US DoE's Paranormal Task Force have
bought and backdoored Verisign?

10 bucks says this conspiracy theory finds its roots in some company owned by
In-Q-Tel, the _gasp_ CIA's _gasp_ VC fund.

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imsteve
A very sane assumption is that the NSA has extensive monitoring capability
that they poor an assload of money into expanding every year.

The only rediculous idea here would be to assume that this is something new.

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tptacek
The fun part about talking about the NSA is that you don't have to exercise
critical thinking; you just propose counterfactuals, citing the NSA's "huge
budget". "Of course they could be monitoring Hushmail". "Of course they could
be monitoring the Internet." "Of course they could be monitoring all our
phones." "Of course they could have chips implanted in our brains". I mean,
after all, they're the NSA!

~~~
imsteve
you do know that chances are that some of us may actually have experience with
these _massive_ organizations, right?

~~~
tptacek
What's your point?

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jey
It doesn't sound unreasonable, but they aren't providing any data. If there's
really all this money changing hands they should be able to find when the
companies were sold and to what entity, and possibly even try to figure out
where else the purchasing entity is involved, like seeing what other
properties they own and what business they conduct.

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icky
Idea! $_$

