Gmail Encrypts Emails to be Safe Against NSA

Google has enhanced the encryption technology for its flagship email service in ways that will make it harder for the NSA to intercept messages moving among the company's worldwide data centers.

According to NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden reports that the NSA had secretly tapped into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world.

Encrypting your Gmail messages from the web interface to Google’s servers and as they bounce around between Google’s servers before being shuttled to your recipient’s Gmail interface is a step in the right direction, but it’s still not a cure-all as far as general Internet security is concerned.

The official company line is as follows:

"Today’s change means that no one can listen in on your messages as they go back and forth between you and Gmail’s servers—no matter if you’re using public WiFi or logging in from your computer, phone or tablet.

In addition, every single email message you send or receive—100% of them—is encrypted while moving internally. This ensures that your messages are safe not only when they move between you and Gmail’s servers, but also as they move between Google’s data centers—something we made a top priority after last summer’s revelations."

The NSA's principal tool to exploit the Google and Yahoo data links is a project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the agency's British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters.

The NSA and GCHQ rely on capturing information being sent between company data centers around the globe via fiber optic cables, intercepting those bits and bytes in transit by tapping in as information is moved from the “Public Internet” to the private “clouds” operated by the likes of Google and Yahoo. 

Those cloud systems involve the linking of international data centers, each processing and containing huge troves of user information for potentially millions of customers. 

Intelligence officers who can sneak through the cracks when information is decrypted  or never encrypted in the first place can then see the information sent in real time and take “a retrospective look at target activity.”

However, on Wednesday the top lawyer for the NSA told a civil liberties oversight board that all communications information and metadata collected by the agency pursuant to the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, whether the material was gathered by the agency’s internet data-mining program PRISM or by the “so-called ‘upstream’ collection of communications moving across the internet”, was done so with the direct knowledge of companies like Google and Facebook.



Author Venkatesh Yalagandula Follow us Google + and Facebook and Twitter