Experts hope to convince the US government to reform the NSA

Jan 27, 2014 13:11 GMT  ·  By

Barack Obama may have announced his planned reforms for the NSA surveillance programs, but most people aren’t happy with them. Privacy advocates, world leaders and tech companies have expressed their doubts that this is going to fix any of the issues.

More than 50 cryptography experts have joined the ranks and signed an open letter addressed to Obama, asking him to put an end to mass surveillance.

“The value of society-wide surveillance in preventing terrorism is unclear, but the threat that such surveillance poses to privacy, democracy, and the US technology sector is readily apparent. Because transparency and public consent are at the core of our democracy, we call upon the US government to subject all mass-surveillance activities to public scrutiny and to resist the deployment of mass-surveillance programs in advance of sound technical and social controls,” the letter reads.

Furthermore, the cryptographers believe that it’s not an issue of allowing the NSA to spy, but rather of providing users a communications infrastructure that isn’t vulnerable to attacks.

“Every country, including our own, must give intelligence and law-enforcement authorities the means to pursue terrorists and criminals, but we can do so without fundamentally undermining the security that enables commerce, entertainment, personal communication, and other aspects of 21st-century life,” the group wrote.

Finally, they urged the US government to reject society-wide surveillance and the subversion of security technology and to adopt state-of-the-art, privacy-preserving technology. Furthermore, they want the government to ensure that any new policies will be guided by enunciated principals, will support human rights, trustworthy commerce and technical innovation.

The list of signers includes professors from major universities, as well as members of various associations. Bruce Schneier, who has been working with journalists writing on the Snowden files, is also on the list.

One of the biggest revelations thus far has been that the NSA has been trying to damage encryption standards everywhere by getting companies to implement backdoors.