Stefan Mileschin

The NSA has hacked two key encryption chips which form an important part of the world wide web.

According to The Guardian, the New York Times and ProPublica the NSA “has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records.

The chips automatically secure the emails, web searches, internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world. The information tipped up in the Edward Snowden documents and claimed that since 2000 the NSA has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used internet encryption technologies.

It did not say what the two chips were.

The NSA vehemently argued that any reporting of any kind on this program would jeopardise national security by alerting terrorists to the fact that encryption products had been successfully compromised.Needless to say it is furious that its spying has been revealed.

None of the documents in the Snowden archive identify all or even most of the encryption standards that had been targeted, and there was a concern that if an attempt were made to identify one or two of them, it could mislead the public into believing that the others were safe. There also seemed to be a concern among some editors that any attempt to identify specific encryption standards would enable terrorists to know which ones to avoid.

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