Google encrypts Gmail to safeguard against NSA snooping

http://rt.com/news/google-gmail-encryption-ns…7/

Google is doing its best to put
a lid on the NSA’s prying eyes
by using enhanced encryption
technology to make its
flagship email service airtight.
“Your email is important to
you, and making sure it stays
safe and always available is
important to us,” Gmail engineering security
chief, Nicolas Lidzborski, said in a blog post.
“Starting today, Gmail will always use an
encrypted HTTPS connection when you check
or send email.
“Today’s change means that no one can listen
in on your messages as they go back and
forth between you and Gmail’s servers — no
matter if you’re using public WiFi or logging in
from your computer, phone or tablet.”
The internet giant’s announcement is the
latest attempt to bolster the company’s widely
used email service and follows a similar step
in 2010, when the company made HTTPS the
default connection option.
At the time, however, users had the option to
turn this protection feature off. Starting from
Friday, Gmail is HTTPS-only. The move is a
response to a disclosure made by National
Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower, Edward
Snowden, that the agency had been secretly
tapping into the main communications links
that connect Yahoo and Google data centers
around the world.
According to a secret January 9, 2013
accounting, millions of records were being
sent every day from Yahoo and Google internal
networks to data warehouses at the NSA’s
Fort Meade, Maryland headquarters.
The NSA’s principal tool to exploit the Google
and Yahoo data links is a project called
MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the agency’s
British counterpart, Government
Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).
To do so, the NSA and GCHQ rely on capturing
information being sent between company data
centers around the globe via fiber optic
cables, intercepting those bits and bytes in
transit by tapping in as information is moved
from the “Public Internet” to the private
“clouds” operated by the likes of Google and
Yahoo. Those cloud systems involve the
linking of international data centers, each
processing and containing huge troves of user
information for potentially millions of
customers. Intelligence officers who can sneak
through the cracks when information is
decrypted — or never encrypted in the first
place — can then see the information sent in
real time and take “a retrospective look at
target activity,” according to documents seen
by the Washington Post.
In November, Google Executive Chairman Eric
Schmidt said the alleged snooping operations
were “outrageous” and perhaps even illegal.
“It’s really outrageous that the National
Security Agency was looking between the
Google data centers, if that’s true,” the Wall
Street Journal quoted Schmidt, who has
served as the Silicon Valley company’s
chairman for over a decade, as saying.
“The steps that the organization was willing
to do without good judgment to pursue its
mission and potentially violate people’s
privacy, it’s not OK,” Schmidt said. “The
Snowden revelations have assisted us in
understanding that it’s perfectly possible that
there are more revelations to come.”
However, on Wednesday the top lawyer for the
NSA told a civil liberties oversight board that
all communications information and metadata
collected by the agency pursuant to the 2008
FISA Amendments Act, whether the material
was gathered by the agency’s internet data-
mining program PRISM or by the “so-called
‘upstream’ collection of communications
moving across the internet”, was done so with
the direct knowledge of companies like Google
and Facebook.
The NSA has previously claimed it only
focuses on targets with foreign intelligence
value. The agency can also request access via
Google and other tech companies with the aid
of a court order.
During an on-stage Q&A at the TED
conference in Vancouver on Thursday, Google
CEO Larry Page maintained that the NSA’s
actions had not been done with the
company’s knowledge and were a threat to
democracy.
“For me, it’s tremendously disappointing that
the government sort of secretly did all these
things and didn’t tell us,” Page said. “I don’t
think we can have a democracy if we’re
having to protect you and our users from the
government for stuff that we never had a
conversation about.”