Is It Safe? Is... It... Safe?

by Scott Creighton

Is the encryption software you bought and use safe? Is it secure? In a word... no.

'The Clinton administration noted in a 1995 background congressional briefing that "Americans have no constitutional right to choose their own method of encryption" and pushed for legislation that would require companies to build in a mechanism for law enforcement agencies to break in.

"We're in favor of strong encryption, robust encryption," then FBI Director
Louis J. Freeh said at a May 11, 1995, Senate hearing. "We just want to make sure we have a trap door and a key under some judge's authority where we can get there if somebody is planning a crime." Reason Jim Epstein 2020

The U.S. government used encryption services to overthrow or monitor countries for decades. In some cases they set up whole companies with encryption services to peddle to nation states with built-in back-doors for them to be able to read state secrets of allies and foes alike. The 5 Eyes program at it's very best.

 

'The Swiss government has ordered an inquiry into a global encryption company based in Zug following revelations it was owned and controlled for decades by US and German intelligence.

Encryption weaknesses added to products sold by Crypto AG allowed the CIA and its German counterpart, the BND, to eavesdrop on adversaries and allies alike while earning million of dollars from the sales, according the Washington Post and the German public broadcaster ZDF, based on the agencies’ internal histories of the intelligence operation.

“It was the intelligence coup of the century,” the CIA report concluded. “Foreign governments were paying good money to the US and West Germany for the privilege of having their most secret communications read by at least two (and possibly as many as five or six) foreign countries.”

The mention of five or six countries is probably a reference to the Five Eyes electronic intelligence sharing agreement between the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The operation, codenamed Thesaurus and then renamed Rubicon in 1980s, demonstrated the overwhelming intelligence value of being able to insert flaws into widely sold communications equipment. The CIA’s success over many years is likely to reinforce current US suspicions of equipment made by the Chinese company Huawei.

Neither China or the Soviet Union bought Crypto encryption devices, suspicious of the company’s origins, but it was sold to more than 100 other countries...' The Guardian Julian Borger 2020

The State Department, USAID, the CIA and other regime change focused entities have used encryption software for decades allowing their proxy armies inside targeted countries to communicate with them and one another for decades.

' A Yahoo news story on Saturday added to the theme, declaring that the Paris attacks show that US surveillance of ISIS is going dark. "Over the past year, current and former intelligence officials tell Yahoo News, IS terror suspects have moved to increasingly sophisticated methods of encrypted communications, using new software such as Tor, that intelligence agencies are having difficulty penetrating---a switch that some officials say was accelerated by the disclosures of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden." Wired Kim Zetter 2015

That's funny. TOR was developed by Naval Intelligence through a DARPA program (look at the level of cope the propagandist used in that Reddit post to tell you it's all good and then used by the CIA to give their terrorist assets, like ISIS, an advantage over local governments to do their dirty little deeds.

Snowden promoted TOR as did Assange, BTW. And to this day, the CIA uses and promotes TOR encryption OPENLY. I mean, hell, you can download and install TOR right from their website.

'Tor, which stands for “the onion router,” is a program anyone can download and use to help strengthen user security online. The Tor network is a series of computers that bounces encrypted internet traffic through several chains of computers before the data arrives at its final destination. Since the data stays within the protected multi-hop Tor network, no one knows the origin and final destination of the data. So, the sender remains anonymous.

To access our onion site, you’ll need the Tor browser and our exact address:' CIA 'news' 2019

The powers that be fear we might find the same kind of secrecy useful if we were to decide to rid ourselves of our current state of affairs in D.C. or that some other nation might do the same thing to us that we do to them.

The government has always claimed they don't want strong encryption services to be available to the public because criminals and pedophiles will use them. That comes from our government... made up mostly of criminals and pedophiles. But that's just cover. From 1995 onward they understood the power and potential problems that privacy presented their fascist agenda and have taken steps to undermine yet another of our constitutional freedoms.

Ever since 'Snowden' (fake name) and Greenwald helped 800 major corporations usher in CISA (formerly CISPA) Big Business has been in the data harvesting industry and as I said a long time ago, they are simply selling your data, that used to take a FISA court to obtain, right to the government, without warrants or any court proceedings whatsoever.

'The National Security Agency buys certain logs related to Americans’ domestic internet activities from commercial data brokers, according to an unclassified letter by the agency.

The letter, addressed to a Democratic senator and obtained by The New York Times, offered few details about the nature of the data other than to stress that it did not include the content of internet communications.

Still, the revelation is the latest disclosure to bring to the fore a legal gray zone: Intelligence and law enforcement agencies sometimes purchase potentially sensitive and revealing domestic data from brokers that would require a court order to acquire directly.' NYT Charlie Savage 2024

They will tell you or write in letters to congress that the content of said communications is not collected, bought and sold but that is bullshit. Of course it is. It's more valuable with the content included and businesses can always be counted on to do that which will generate the most profit so of course they trade in your personal data and thoughts. Without a doubt.

But even without that information, it's still immoral and illegal.

Listen, if you want to use a VPN or TOR or StartMail, PrivateMail or PGP to make yourself FEEL better about your day to day communications, that's fine.

Just keep whistling past the graveyard to keep the demons at bay.

But know this: it doesn't. It wont.

If there is a major service either domestic or foreign promising you to keep your communications invisible from prying government eyes, and it's available here in the States for a price... then it's not doing what it claims to do.

Because if it did, it wouldn't be available.

Someone much smarter than me once said if voting made any real difference in this country it would be illegal. 

Same holds true for encryption. It's been their game from the beginning and always will be.

Just keep that in mind and buy some stamps.