To Let Them Monitor or Not ... Perhaps that Is Not the Real Question [Commentary]

The United States is now debating the wisdom of limits on monitoring by its National Security Agency (NSA). While the privacy/security tradeoffs for even passive monitoring are complicated, articles on Google have suggested that the NSA's activities are more intrusive than previously thought. There is increasing evidence that NSA may be interfering with secured Internet transactions by using a backdoor attack, "a method of bypassing normal authentication, securing illegal remote access to a computer, obtaining access to plaintext, and so on, while attempting to remain undetected." For example, the US NSA appears to have been connected to a recent backdoor attack involving the random number generator (RNG) used in virtually every Internet transaction. This is reminiscent of the celebrated backdoor believed to have occurred in 1941 when the FBI "borrowed" codebooks from the Japanese consulate in Manhattan. I will explain in this article the role cryptography plays in our everyday lives, the current involvement of the NSA, and suggest a possible intrusion by them on our privacy which is hinted at in articles posted on Google.