Shutting the backdoor

Shutting the Backdoor: The Perils of National Security and Digital Surveillance Programs Ronald Deibert | October 2013 Strategic Studies Working Group Papers Shutting the Backdoor: The Perils of National Security and Digital Surveillance Programs ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ron Deibert, (OOnt, PhD, University of British Columbia) is Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Canada Centre for Global [...] In 2013, he was appointed to the Order of Ontario and awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee medal, for being “among the first to recognize and take measures to mitigate growing threats to communications rights, openness and security worldwide.” The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Canadian International Council, its S [...] Codenamed “Shamrock,” the program required the companies to, on a daily basis, hand over to the NSA copies of all of the cables sent to, from, or through the US.1 During the Cold War, a variety of signals intelligence collection mechanisms, from specially equipped naval vessels to huge land-based antennas, intercepted stray radar and radio transmissions, even those that bounced off the surface of [...] At the same time, huge and exponentially growing volumes of digital data, processed and archived through the Internet’s physical points of control (e.g., switches, gateways, exchange points), presented irresistible targets for data mining and analysis, leading the government to seek access through cooperation with the companies that own and operate the infrastructure. [...] During the “Clipper Chip” debate of the 1990s, the US government attempted to mandate the production of special chips into telecommunications equipment that would allow the NSA to eavesdrop on voice traffic using a surrendered encryption key.