NSA surveillance immunity

23/10/2007 Written by minor

It is well known, not only among com­mu­nity, that after ⁹⁄₁₁ AT&T allowed sur­veil­lance for law enforce­ment agen­cies, espe­cially NSA. Many law­suits after that were filled claim­ing ille­gal coop­er­a­tion with National Secu­rity Agency.

Of course it is not only AT&T, that allowed such activ­i­ties, Already before ⁹⁄₁₁ there were signs of coop­er­a­tion between NSA and big com­pa­nies. Just to remind you, in year 1999 and 2000 there was great debate about so called _​NSAKEY.

It was in Microsoft Inter­net Explorer, library ADVAPI.DLL should allow to run spe­cial pro­gramms inserted and con­trolled by NSA. Dr. Nicko van Someren dis­as­sem­bled this file and found two dif­fer­ent keys, after few weeks, he with another researchers real­ized that labels of these keys are “KEY” and “NSAKEY”. Of course Microsoft denied any spec­u­la­tions. You can read more here. But coop­er­a­tion between Microsoft and NSA con­tin­ues, online mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers informed, that NSA con­tributed also to devel­op­ment of Microsoft’s newest flag­ship Vista.

Now, U.S. Sen­ate pre­pares new bill, that will pro­tect tele­phone com­pa­nies and also another com­pa­nies like email providers, search engines, ISP’s and instant mes­sag­ing ser­vices from such law­suits, NEWS​.com informed. More­over, this bill will pro­vide retroac­tive immu­nity and it was also insisted by U.S. Pres­i­dent Bush.

It seems, that pri­vacy and free­dom will get next slap from Sen­a­tors and U.S. gov­ern­ment as well, because in the name of national secu­rity they are vio­lated. More­over this bill influ­ences not only U.S., it will be valid for every­one, who is using tech­nolo­gies from U.S.. It might be maybe nec­es­sary that ven­dors cer­tify their prod­ucts and ser­vices as: “NSA ads and sur­veil­lance free”.