Google Engineers Say ‘Fuck You’ to the NSA, Encrypt Future Stolen Data

While their bosses use less salty language to push for reform and transparency, a couple of Google’s security engineers have taken to the company’s own social network to vent their frustration at U.S. and British spying.

“Fuck these guys,” said Brandon Downey. “I’ve spent the last ten years of my life trying to keep Google’s users safe and secure from the many diverse threats Google faces,” and he goes on to describe some of those threats, including malware, worms and oppressive governments. “The US has to be better than this; but I guess in the interim, that security job is looking a lot more like a Sisyphus thing than ever.”

Sisyphus, for those who don’t remember their Greek mythology, is the king who is condemned to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity.

Mike Hearn joined his colleague:

I now join him in issuing a giant Fuck You to the people who made these slides. I am not American, I am a Brit, but it’s no different – GCHQ turns out to be even worse than the NSA.

We designed this system to keep criminals out . There’s no ambiguity here. The warrant system with skeptical judges, paths for appeal, and rules of evidence was built from centuries of hard won experience. When it works, it represents as good a balance as we’ve got between the need to restrain the state and the need to keep crime in check. Bypassing that system is illegal for a good reason .

Unfortunately we live in a world where all too often, laws are for the little people. Nobody at GCHQ or the NSA will ever stand before a judge and answer for this industrial-scale subversion of the judicial process. In the absence of working law enforcement, we therefore do what internet engineers have always done – build more secure software. The traffic shown in the slides below is now all encrypted and the work the NSA/GCHQ staff did on understanding it, ruined.

Thank you Edward Snowden. For me personally, this is the most interesting revelation all summer.

— Posted by Peter Z. Scheer