And so it is announced the NSA is into the data stream flowing into Yahoo and Google in the cloud.
"In an NSA presentation slide on 'Google Cloud Exploitation' ... a sketch shows where the 'Public Internet' meets the internal 'Google Cloud' where their data resides. In hand-printed letters, the drawing notes that encryption is 'added and removed here!' The artist adds a smiley face, a cheeky celebration of victory over Google security.-- The Washington Post
"Two engineers with close ties to Google exploded in profanity when they saw the drawing."
Non-denial denials ensue, to paraphrase from All the President's Men.
To summarize last few months.
Remember all that digital Pearl Harbor stuff? How the greatest economic theft of intellectual property and future wealth was being conducted by Chinese cyberspies? Years and years of warnings, now 98 percent an historic misdirection play. So who protects all of us, the global community, from our digital war machinery?
It's the NSA's world and now we live in it.
"Now 61, [NSA Keith Alexander] has said he plans to retire in 2014; when he does step down he will leave behind an enduring legacy--a position of far-reaching authority ..." reads a piece at Wired earlier this year.
"We jokingly referred to him as Emperor Alexander, because whatever Keith wants, Keith gets."
When you let the people in the biggest cyberwar machine in history have whatever they want the only thing left is to turn it on everyone. If the power and resources are there to do it, it is done. Because they can.
Which is what has happened. There's little to add except that through Edward Snowden's documents and their delivery via the Washington Post and the Guardian, one sees the world Alexander has created. It's one that cements the global perception that people in the US computer security industry (government and private sector allies) are an untrustworthy lot, predatory and needing close oversight.
"You don't trust your own secret service?" -John Watson "Naturally not. They all spy on people for money." -- Mycroft Holmes from A Scandal in Belgravia, Sherlock
