14 DAY TRIAL // The generally accepted idea that if you encrypted your data, you’d be safe from spying has been shattered with the latest leak from the Snowden stash as it was revealed that the NSA and the GCHQ have invested billions of dollars into efforts to make online privacy obsolete by cracking or bypassing encryptions.
Intelligence officials, of course, have gone out of their way to convince the three publications working on the story – The Guardian, The New York Times and ProPublica – to not publish the story since it might provide foreign targets enough information to switch to new forms of encryption or communications that would make it harder to collect and read vital information.
Obviously, the news organizations decided not to bow down to their request, although they made some concessions and removed some specific facts before publishing the articles.
“The potential for abuse of such extraordinary capabilities for surveillance, including for political purposes, is considerable. The government insists it has put in place checks and balances to limit misuses of this technology. But the question of whether they are effective is far from resolved and is an issue that can only be debated by the people and their elected representatives if the basic facts are revealed,” ProPublica said in a statement, explaining why the story still ran.
Of course, this isn’t the first time authorities put in an effort to get the media to stop publishing story that reveal the depths and the efforts put in by the intelligence agencies of the United States and United Kingdom to remove any and all privacy walls put between the Internet users’ communications and their prying eyes.
It happened with the Guardian not long ago when UK’s officials demanded they hand over or destroy all documents related to the operations run by the GCHQ.
The refusal led to the destruction of the newspaper’s hard drives under the watchful eyes of two GCHQ agents and to a pact signed with the New York Times to publish information about the British intelligence agency since there are more laws protecting journalists in the US.
The incident with David Miranda, Glenn Greenwald’s partner, where he was detained for nine hours in the Heathrow airport under anti-terrorism laws can also be classified as an effort to intimidate the journalist into not publishing further materials.