The latest Snowden-supplied bombshell shook the technology world to its core on Thursday: The NSA can crack many of the encryption technologies in place today, using a mixture of backdoors baked into software at the government's behest, a $250 million per year budget to encourage commercial software vendors to make its security "exploitable," and sheer computer-cracking technological prowess.
To some extent, it's not surprising to hear that the U.S. spy agency is doing spy agency stuff but, given the recent surveillance revelations and the fact that other countries likely have similar capabilities, the news is certainly worrying. To make matters worse, it came just a day after Pew reported that 90 percent of Internet users have taken steps to avoid surveillance in some way.
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All is not lost, however. While the stunning reports failed to name exactly which companies and encryption technologies have been compromised by the NSA, you can minimize the chances that your encrypted communications will be cracked by the government -- or anyone else. Read on.
Embrace open source
Now that we know that corporations -- or at least individuals in corporations -- have worked with the NSA to build backdoors into encryption technology, privacy buffs should give commercial encryption technology (such as Microsoft's BitLocker) the hairy eye.
You're better off using tools that employ open-source or public-domain encryption methods, as they need to work with every vendor's software and, in the case of open-source encryption, can be scrutinized for potential security flaws.
With that in mind, here are some tools worth checking out:
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