Over the past few months, there has been many new events and revelations in the ongoing timline of the "War on Privacy" conducted by our Government, including the trial and conviction of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange running for Senator in Australia and new leaks and confirmations regarding the ongoing efforts of our government to conduct massive secret spying programs on it's own citizens.
The Federal Government is spending a ton of money to make sure they can read your e-mail, even if it's encrypted. In fact, they are working on getting to the bottom of the annoying encryption problem fouling up their massive data collection efforts. What good are entire server farms worth of data if you can't access it?
In the latest batch of documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, it's been revealed that the government is currently operating a 35,000-employee program which costs almost $11 billion dollars a year dedicated entirely to cracking common forms of cryptography for mass communication. In what has to be one of the biggest gatherings of brain power, this is an understandably important undertaking for the growing surveillance state.
Director of national intelligence James Clapper was revealed in a summary in one of the leaked documents to have stated that the government is investing in "groundbreaking crytanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit Internet traffic." Unfortunately, Mr. Clapper did not clarify what kind of Internet traffic, and what they are classifying "adversarial cryptography".
The current path our government is on in regards to domestic surveillance is unfortunately no longer a secret to anyone, with a flood of information coming out in the past few months about several formerly top secret NSA programs such as PRISM. Certain members of our government seem to feel that it is necessary for our security to violate privacy on a massive level. Ars Technica recently reported on the fears of the cryptography community, with the idea being espoused that common forms of cryptographic algorithms will be able to be broken. Several popular security commentators including Bruce Scheier have publically come out against this as being an unfeasible situation, even though it would still be technically possible. However, modern forms of encryption such as those formats using 256-bit keys are still considered impossible to break in our lifetimes. The problem is updating corporate and business infrastructure and educating admins as to what new security standards ought to be used.
The problem is in effect a question of urgency, and means. The government is in the process of harnessing their data collection and growing their initiatives on a massive scale. In a no longer secret intelligence budget leaked by Snowden to the Washington Post recently, it was revealed that our government spends over $52 billion dollars a year on surveillance and intelligence gathering, adding to prior revelations that the NSA bugged the headquarters of the European Union, and hacked into the video conferencing communications systems at UN Headquarters, both illegal acts under international law.
sources:
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/08/feds-plow-10-billion-into-groundbreaking-crypto-cracking-program/
http://www.fastcompany.com/3016340/the-code-war/nsa-hacked-the-un-by-cracking-its-internal-video-conferencing-system
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