It was inevitable: the Advanced Research Projects Agency, later to become DARPA, right out of the Pentagon, created the internet. The RAND Corporation invented modern packet switching. DARPA and ARPANET recruited Vint Cerf of Stanford University to work on TCP/IP. Cerf is regarded as “the father of the Internet,” or maybe that should be the military-NSA snoop network. Now, we learn NSA increasingly controls SSL, now called Transport Layer Security, the cryptographic protocol that provide secure communications on the internet for web browsing, e-mail, instant messaging, and other data transfers. In other words, increasingly, the NSA is reading your email and everything you type in your IM client — and in real time, that is to say there is no delay in the timeliness of the information, the underwear drawer snoopers have the ability to read your IMs as you type them.
“Certain privacy/full session SSL email hosting services have been purchased/changed operational control by NSA and affiliates within the past few months, through private intermediary entities,” notes Cryptome.
Hushmail: now fully owned by private entity NSA affiliate; has had informal relationship with NSA for a number of years that effectively provided NSA with real time access to Hushmail’s hosting servers.
Safe-mail.net: Israeli-based, ironically privately lauded by NSA and US military several years ago for its sound implementation of SendMail with SSL webmail GUI frontend. Now provides mail server info to NSA in real time.
Guardster.com (SSH/SSL proxy): NSA contractors have “bought” full access rights to Guardster servers a few days ago. Separate but related: facilitated port sniffing of hosting servers at Everyones Internet, on NSA affiliates’ behalf, has been ongoing for a number of months now.
Geekspeak aside, what this means is that the NSA is buying up key technology in an effort to snoop you even more closely. If this trend continues, we may as well call the internet the NSAnet.
Moreover, according to Cryptome’s research, if you own “security” software produced by Zone Alarm, Symantec, and MacAfee, you are in essence throwing out a welcome mat for the NSA and its bevy of underwear drawer sniffing goons. “All facilitate Microsoft’s NSA-controlled remote admin access via IP/TCP ports 1024 through 1030,” and without a “security flag,” that it to say you will be none the wiser.
It won’t be long now before Winston Smith’s telescreen is barking orders.