14 DAY TRIAL // Google has been working with the NSA in a relationship that’s a tad closer than what was originally thought, a series of letters reveal.
According to Al Jazeera, which posted an email correspondence between the NSA’s Keith Alexander and Google’s Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin, they’re all discussing a cooperation deal where Google would help NSA create an industry security framework.
The emails are dated back to 2012, in January and June, and they discuss Google’s participation in NSA’s Enduring Security Framework (ESF). While Schmidt informed Alexander that he wouldn’t be able to attend the meeting, he invited him to reschedule. Later on, in an email from Alexander to Brin, the Google cofounder is thanked for attending the ESF meeting, which was about threats facing the industry, as well as several strategies for mitigating these issues.
The messages exchanged by the top Google execs with the NSA indicate that the company had been one of the few picked to participate in NSA’s effort to coordinate government and industry actions on important security issues that couldn’t be solved by individual actors alone.
Google isn’t the only company that was roped in the deal, the files indicate. The list includes Apple and Microsoft, as well as Intel, AMD, HP and Dell.
In the pitch, the NSA notes that the project has already played a massive role in the deployment of measures to protect against a BIOS attack plot on computer systems in the United States. It should be mentioned that leaked files from Edward Snowden have in fact indicated that the NSA had been using its own BIOS-level malware to target systems.
Of course, the fact that Google was working with the NSA on such a project isn’t exactly surprising since most companies in the tech world had been doing the same, including the RSA, which has been using a random number generator built by the spy agency in its tools.
As the RSA explained a few months back, no one knew that the NSA was the bad guy beforehand. In fact, the NSA has been playing a major role in the development of secured communications, of industry-wide security standards and more. Basically, the agency may have been working on the side to spy on the entire world, but officially, the NSA was helping everyone to protect themselves from outside threats; the wolf in sheep’s clothing.
“I think the public should be concerned about whether the NSA was really making its best efforts, as the emails claim, to help secure enterprise BIOS and mobile devices and not holding the best vulnerabilities close to their chest,” Nate Cardozo, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Al Jazeera.
As many have pointed out before, collaboration between the government and the tech industry on security problems is essential, but the NSA’s intentions are questionable at best.