Monthly Archives: June 2014

Andreessen calls Snowden ‘traitor,’ blasts Obama for not countering leaks

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While leading tech CEOs called on Congress to rein in the National Security Agency, one prominent Silicon Valley figure Thursday turned his ire toward a different target, calling former NSA contractor Edward Snowden a "traitor" for leaking government secrets.

"Obviously he's a traitor. ... He stole national security secrets and gave them to everybody on the planet," venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said in an interview with CNBC, while also blasting the Obama administration for not doing more to counter the Snowden leaks.

Andreessen conceded his view of Snowden isn't shared by many in Silicon Valley. But his comments and the tech leaders' call for tougher reforms illustrate how raw the NSA spying issue remains in Silicon Valley -- exactly one year after the first of many news reports appeared that were based on Snowden's leaks about agency efforts to collect phone records and Internet user data.

Top executives at Google, Facebook and other leading Internet companies have previously voiced outrage over programs revealed by those leaks, including NSA efforts to weaken encryption and intercept transmissions between the companies' overseas data centers. This week, the CEOs of nine leading companies published an open letter in several newspapers, urging the U.S. Senate to adopt tougher reforms than those contained in the so-called USA Freedom bill passed by the House of Representatives last month.

While the companies have beefed up security to guard users' data, "the government needs to do more," said the letter signed by Google's Larry Page, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and other top CEOs.

The same companies have complained that the NSA revelations will harm their business, which depends on users trusting them with often-sensitive information. The leaks are already having an economic impact, said Dean Garfield of the Information Technology Industry Council, which represents many of the companies, in testimony Thursday at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the committee, has previously defended the NSA. But she said Thursday that she is open to tightening language in the House bill that tech companies and civil liberties groups have described as a potential loophole for continued bulk collection of Internet user data.

Despite the economic fallout, many in the tech industry see Snowden's actions as heroic. He was warmly received by an audience of tech professionals when he spoke, by video connection from Moscow, at the South by Southwest conference in Austin earlier this year. They applauded when Snowden's attorney read a message from Tim Berners-Lee, a respected computer scientist and Internet pioneer, who wrote that Snowden's leaks were "profoundly in the public interest."

While Snowden's defenders, including the American Civil Liberties Union, view his actions as those of a legitimate whistle-blower, Andreessen disagreed. The co-founder of Netscape, an early Web browser firm, he now leads the prominent tech venture firm Andreessen Horowitz and sits on the boards of Facebook, eBay and Hewlett-Packard.

Speaking on CNBC, Andreessen echoed earlier statements in which he said he wasn't surprised by the NSA spying. "I just thought that's what they were doing," he added. "I thought everybody knew that."

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Andreessen calls Snowden 'traitor,' blasts Obama for not countering leaks

Google’s Chrome Gmail encryption extension hides NSA-jabbing Easter Egg

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Google is famous for its Easter Eggs, including web pages that do barrel rolls or blink or hide video gamesbut rarely do Google's bits of fun take a political tone. Showing just unhappy the company or at least its engineers are with the National Security Agency's surveillance activities Google included a jab at America's spooks in a new Chrome browser extension.

End-to-end's code includes a jab at the NSA.

The code for Google's upcoming email encryption extension for Chrome called End-to-End includes the words, "--SSL-added-and-removed-here-;-)."

That line's a quote from an October 2013 report detailing the NSA's efforts to tap into the internal network links of major companies such as Google and Yahoo.

Known as the MUSCULAR program, the report in the Washington Post said the NSA in cooperation with Britain's GCHQ spy agency was collecting massive amounts of data pulled directly from Google and Yahoo servers located outside the U.S.

The NSA was happily nabbing data from Google's servers. Image source: The Washington Post.

In a slide published by the Post the NSA created a quick overview sketch of how it obtains data from Google's servers. At the bottom the drawing, the NSA wrote "SSL added and removed here! :-)." The NSA was capitalizing on the fact that Google, at the time, was stripping encryption from data as it flowed from the public Internet into Google's internal network.

When two Google engineers first saw the drawing they "exploded in profanity," according to the Post.

Nearly eight months later, Google is taking its revenge or at least the company hopes it is.

Google's End-to-End extension promises to make it easier to use OpenPGP email encryption in the browser. Currently, the easiest option for email encryption is to use a mail client like Mozilla Thunderbird with the Enigmail add-on. A number of other non-Google tools aiming to make email encryption easier are also in development such as Mailvelope, Dark Mail, and Mailpile.

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Google's Chrome Gmail encryption extension hides NSA-jabbing Easter Egg