Panopticon of global surveillance

[Carsten Wiethoff]

An interesting article about the change in methods the NSA employs:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/20...?page=full

Interviews with current and former intelligence officials conducted over the past two months have revealed that since 9/11, the NSA's computer scientists, electronic engineers, software programmers, and collection specialists have been remarkably inventive in finding new and innovative ways to circumvent the protections supposedly offered by encryption systems by compromising them through clandestine means. Among these clandestine means are CIA and FBI "black-bag jobs," as well as secret efforts by the U.S. intelligence community to interdict the shipment of advanced encryption technology to America's enemies around the world and insert "back doors" into commercially available computer, communications, and encryption technologies that allow the NSA to covertly access these systems without the users knowing it.
But the most sensitive of these clandestine techniques, and by far the most productive to date, is to covertly hack into targeted computers and copy the documents and message traffic stored on these machines before they are encrypted, a process known within the NSA as "Endpoint" operations. Responsibility for conducting these Endpoint operations rests with the computer hackers of the NSA's cyberespionage unit, the Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO).
According to sources familiar with the organization's operations, TAO has been enormously successful over the past 12 years in covertly inserting highly sophisticated spyware into the hard drives of over 80,000 computer systems around the world, although this number could be much higher. And according to the sources, these implants are designed in such a way that they cannot be detected by currently available commercial computer security software. It has been suggested to me by a reliable source that "this is not an accident," with the insinuation being that many of the biggest commercially available computer security software systems made in the United States and overseas have been compromised by the NSA, either covertly or with the knowledge and consent of the companies that manufacture these systems.