The revelations that the NSA has seemingly managed to infiltrate and spy upon individuals are bad enough for most of us, but some members of the Google tech team that work specifically on how to keep hackers out of its system are really none too pleased.
Writing in a post yesterday, and reported by The Desk today, Google account security employee Mike Hearn expressed his displeasure at the news that the NSA had managed to circumvent security in place designed to stop people from intercepting data and breaking into their systems.
“The packet capture shown in these new NSA slides shows internal database replication traffic for the anti-hacking system I worked on for over two years,” Hearn wrote. “We designed this system to keep criminals out . There’s no ambiguity here. The warrant system with skeptical judges, paths for appeal, and rules of evidence was built from centuries of hard won experience […] Bypassing that system is illegal for a good reason.”
In the post, Hearn also notes that the NSA’s efforts to understand its systems now amount to nothing, as all the internal traffic is now also encrypted:
Nobody at GCHQ or the NSA will ever stand before a judge and answer for this industrial-scale subversion of the judicial process. In the absence of working law enforcement, we therefore do what internet engineers have always done – build more secure software. The traffic shown in the slides below is now all encrypted and the work the NSA/GCHQ staff did on understanding it, ruined.
Hearn’s comments echoed (and also referenced) similar views from a colleague, Brandon Downey, who also posted his thoughts to Google+ recently.
“Brandon Downey, a colleague of mine on the Google security team, said (after the usual disclaimers about being personal opinions and not speaking for the firm which I repeat here) – “f*** these guys”… I now join him in issuing a giant F*** You to the people who made these slides,” he wrote.
Rounding it off, he simply says “Thank you Edward Snowden. For me personally, this is the most interesting revelation all summer.”
➤ Via The Desk
Featured Image Credit – Shutterstock
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.