Breaking Greenwald Bombshell: Spy Agencies Crack Encryption Methods!
Greenwald and the Guardian’s latest bombshell breaking story on the NSA uses a fear-mongering tactic that’s been common throughout their bombshell breaking stories — a seemingly deliberate intention to confuse and conflate the ability to do something with the act of doing something.
The breathless headline: US and UK Spy Agencies Defeat Privacy and Security on the Internet.
The overheated lead paragraphs:
US and British intelligence agencies have successfully cracked much of the online encryption relied upon by hundreds of millions of people to protect the privacy of their personal data, online transactions and emails, according to top-secret documents revealed by former contractor Edward Snowden.
The files show that the National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have broadly compromised the guarantees that internet companies have given consumers to reassure them that their communications, online banking and medical records would be indecipherable to criminals or governments.
And not a hint of acknowledgment that in order to decrypt any US citizen’s information for any purpose, the government still needs to get an individual warrant. (This time, a search for “warrant” in the article returned no results.)
The bombshell comes down to this: spy agencies crack encryption schemes.
“Since the beginning of human history,” the Guardian did not add.
Greenwald boasts that he ignored government requests not to publish the article:
“Intelligence officials asked the Guardian, New York Times and ProPublica not to publish this article” http://t.co/SeboSzdzBr
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 5, 2013