The latest thought of the NSA probably breaks every record of exhaustion and should be entered into the Guinness Book. The Washington Post reports that the US secret service is requesting the creation of a “master key” encryption for all products that will be split and given to various organizations and services.
The idea was mentioned in a speech by Michael Rogers, director of the NSA, at Princeton University.
“We don’t want a backdoor,” Rogers is reported to have said, “I want a normal front door. And I want the front door to have multiple locks. Big secure locks.” His idea states that the key to the front door will be held by several services, and only if they all decide to use it together will decryption be possible.
Rogers however did not mention any of the conditions under which the services would accept to unlock encrypted data. He also did not mention what would happen if someone reconstructed a key that would obviously have to be hard‑coded in the firmware of a phone for example. He did not specify what the conditions would be under which keys would be given to the “services,” as well as what those “services.”
As the Washington Post reports, this particular idea is not the only one being considered by the White House geniuses. The newspaper also reports that the NSA is simply considering a mirroring of messages sent from mobile phones, under judicial supervision (sic).
The judge can “direct an operation to create a mirror account so that law enforcement authorities can conduct a criminal investigation by reading text messages shortly after they have been sent” (again sic)
