UK Cryptographers Call For UK and US To Out Weakened Products 105
Trailrunner7 writes "A group of cryptographers in the UK has published a letter that calls on authorities in that country and the United States to conduct an investigation to determine which security products, protocols and standards have been deliberately weakened by the countries' intelligence services. The letter, signed by a number of researchers from the University of Bristol and other universities, said that the NSA and British GCHQ 'have been acting against the interests of the public that they are meant to serve.' The appeal comes a couple of weeks after leaked documents from the NSA and its UK counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, showed that the two agencies have been collaborating on projects that give them the ability to subvert encryption protocols and also have been working with unnamed security vendors to insert backdoors into hardware and software products."
Re:Is it for real? (Score:5, Informative)
They've apparently been interfering with open source and free software. (See John Gilmore's notes about the security agency hindered deveopment of IPsec, at http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg12325.html [mail-archive.com] )
Re:hahhaha (Score:2, Informative)
And part of "the public interest" is tracking down the people who want to drop off a truck bomb at the shopping center I'm going to be at. And part of tracking those people down is monitoring their communications.