<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:14pt"><div class="" style=""><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/07/technology/internet-giants-erect-barriers-to-spy-agencies.html?mabReward=RI%3A15&module=WelcomeBackModal&contentCollection=Fashion%20%26%20Style®ion=FixedCenter&action=click&pgtype=article" class="" style="">http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/07/technology/internet-giants-erect-barriers-to-spy-agencies.html?mabReward=RI%3A15&module=WelcomeBackModal&contentCollection=Fashion%20%26%20Style®ion=FixedCenter&action=click&pgtype=article</a><br style=""></div><div class="" data-para-count="371" data-total-count="371" itemprop="articleBody" id="story-continues-1" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width:
540px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><br></div><div class="" data-para-count="371" data-total-count="371" itemprop="articleBody" id="story-continues-1" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width: 540px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-style: normal; background-color: transparent;">MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Just down the road from Google’s main campus here, engineers for the company are accelerating what has become the newest arms race in modern technology: They are making it far more difficult — and far more expensive — for the National Security Agency and the intelligence arms of other governments around the world to pierce their systems.</div><div class="" data-para-count="292" data-total-count="663" itemprop="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia,
'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width: 540px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">As fast as it can, Google is sealing up cracks in its systems that Edward J. Snowden revealed the N.S.A. had brilliantly exploited. It is encrypting more data as it moves among its servers and helping customers encode their own emails. Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo are taking similar steps.</div><div class="" data-para-count="286" data-total-count="949" itemprop="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width: 540px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">After years of cooperating with the government, the immediate goal now is to thwart Washington — as well as Beijing and Moscow. The strategy is also intended to preserve business overseas in places like Brazil and Germany that have threatened to entrust data only to local providers.</div><div
class="" data-para-count="278" data-total-count="1227" itemprop="articleBody" id="story-continues-6" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width: 540px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Google, for example, is laying its own fiber optic cable under the world’s oceans, a project that began as an effort to cut costs and extend its influence, but now has an added purpose: to assure that the company will have more control over the movement of its customer data.</div><div class="" data-para-count="408" data-total-count="1635" itemprop="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width: 540px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><span style="line-height: 1.4375rem;" class="">But governments are fighting back, harder than ever.
The cellphone giant Vodafone reported on Friday that a “small number” of governments around the world have demanded the ability to tap directly into its communication networks, a level of surveillance that elicited outrage from privacy advocates.</span>A year after Mr. Snowden’s revelations, the era of quiet cooperation is over. Telecommunications companies say they are denying requests to volunteer data not covered by existing law. A.T.&T., Verizon and others say that compared with a year ago, they are far more reluctant to cooperate with the United States government in “gray areas” where there is no explicit requirement for a legal warrant.</div><div class="" data-para-count="449" data-total-count="2387" itemprop="articleBody" id="story-continues-2" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width: 540px; color: rgb(51,
51, 51);">Vodafone refused to name the nations on Friday for fear of putting its business and employees at risk there. But in an accounting of the number of legal demands for information that it receives from 14 companies, it noted that some countries did not issue warrants to obtain phone, email or web-searching traffic, because “the relevant agencies and authorities already have permanent access to customer communications via their own direct link.”</div><div class="" data-para-count="193" data-total-count="2580" itemprop="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width: 540px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">The company also said it had to acquiesce to some governments’ requests for data to comply with national laws. Otherwise, it said, it faced losing its license to operate in certain countries.</div><div class=""
data-para-count="125" data-total-count="2705" itemprop="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width: 540px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Eric Grosse, Google’s security chief, suggested in an interview that the N.S.A.’s own behavior invited the new arms race.</div><div class="" data-para-count="272" data-total-count="2977" itemprop="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width: 540px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">“I am willing to help on the purely defensive side of things,” he said, referring to Washington’s efforts to enlist Silicon Valley in cybersecurity efforts. “But signals intercept is totally off the table,” he said, referring to national intelligence gathering.</div><div
class="" data-para-count="71" data-total-count="3048" itemprop="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width: 540px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">“No hard feelings, but my job is to make their job hard,” he added.</div><div class="" data-para-count="272" data-total-count="3320" itemprop="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width: 540px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">In Washington, officials acknowledge that covert programs are now far harder to execute because American technology companies, fearful of losing international business, are hardening their networks and saying no to requests for the kind of help they once quietly provided.</div><div class="" data-para-count="317"
data-total-count="3637" itemprop="articleBody" id="story-continues-3" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width: 540px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Robert S. Litt, the general counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees all 17 American spy agencies, said on Wednesday that it was “an unquestionable loss for our nation that companies are losing the willingness to cooperate legally and voluntarily” with American spy agencies.</div><div class="" data-para-count="198" data-total-count="3835" itemprop="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width: 540px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">“Just as there are technological gaps, there are legal gaps,” he said, speaking at the
Wilson Center in Washington, “that leave a lot of gray area” governing what companies could turn over.</div><div class="" data-para-count="307" data-total-count="4142" itemprop="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width: 540px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">In the past, he said, “we have been very successful” in getting that data. But he acknowledged that for now, those days are over, and he predicted that “sooner or later there will be some intelligence failure and people will wonder why the intelligence agencies were not able to protect the nation.”</div><div class="" data-para-count="186" data-total-count="4328" itemprop="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width: 540px;
color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Companies respond that if that happens, it is the government’s own fault and that intelligence agencies, in their quest for broad data collection, have undermined web security for all.</div><div class="" data-para-count="415" data-total-count="4743" itemprop="articleBody" id="story-continues-7" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width: 540px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Many point to an episode in 2012, when Russian security researchers uncovered a state espionage tool, Flame, on Iranian computers. Flame, like the Stuxnet worm, is believed to have been produced at least in part by American intelligence agencies. It was created by exploiting a previously unknown flaw in Microsoft’s operating systems. Companies argue that others could have later taken advantage of this defect.</div><div class=""
data-para-count="449" data-total-count="5192" itemprop="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width: 540px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Worried that such an episode undercuts confidence in its wares, Microsoft is now fully encrypting all its products, including Hotmail and Outlook.com, by the end of this year with 2,048-bit encryption, a stronger protection that would take a government far longer to crack. The software is protected by encryption both when it is in data centers and when data is being sent over the Internet, said Bradford L. Smith, the company’s general counsel.</div><div class="" data-para-count="400" data-total-count="5592" itemprop="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px;
max-width: 540px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Mr. Smith also said the company was setting up “transparency centers” abroad so that technical experts of foreign governments could come in and inspect Microsoft’s proprietary source code. That will allow foreign governments to check to make sure there are no “back doors” that would permit snooping by United States intelligence agencies. The first such center is being set up in Brussels.</div><div class="" data-para-count="422" data-total-count="6014" itemprop="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width: 540px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Microsoft has also pushed back harder in court. In a Seattle case, the government issued a “national security letter” to compel Microsoft to turn over data about a customer, along with a gag order to prevent Microsoft from telling
the customer it had been compelled to provide its communications to government officials. Microsoft challenged the gag order as violating the First Amendment. The government backed down.</div><div class="" data-para-count="516" data-total-count="6530" itemprop="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width: 540px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Hardware firms like Cisco, which makes routers and switches, have found their products a frequent subject of Mr. Snowden’s disclosures, and their<a title="About the fallout." href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/22/business/fallout-from-snowden-hurting-bottom-line-of-tech-companies.html" style="color: rgb(50, 104, 145);" class="">business has declined</a> steadily in countries like Asia, Brazil and Europe over the last year. The company is still struggling to convince foreign
customers that their networks are safe from hackers — and free of “back doors” installed by the N.S.A. The frustration, companies here say, is that it is nearly impossible to prove that their systems are N.S.A.-proof.</div><div class="" data-para-count="175" data-total-count="6705" itemprop="articleBody" id="story-continues-5" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width: 540px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><span style="line-height: 1.4375rem;" class=""><br class="" style="">In one slide from the disclosures, N.S.A. analysts pointed to a sweet spot inside Google’s data centers, where they could catch traffic in unencrypted form. Next to a quickly drawn smiley face, an N.S.A. analyst, referring to an acronym for a common layer of protection, had noted, “SSL added and removed here!”</span>Most American companies said they never
knowingly let the N.S.A. weaken their systems, or install back doors. But Mr. Snowden’s documents showed how the agency found a way.</div><div id="SponLinkA" class="" style="float: right; clear: right; margin: 0px 0px 40px 7px; position: relative; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: nyt-cheltenham, georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 16px;"><ins class="" data-ad-client="nytimes_article_var" data-color-bg="#f8f8f9" data-font-face="arial" data-font-size="small" data-color-border="#e5e5e5" data-color-line="#fff" data-color-link="#9f9697" data-color-url="#9f9697" data-color-text="#bfbcc3" data-ad-type="text" data-safe="high" data-adsbygoogle-status="done" style="display: inline-block; width: 300px; height: 250px;"><ins style="display: inline-table; border: none; height: 250px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; visibility: visible; width: 300px; background-color: transparent;" class=""><ins id="aswift_0_anchor"
style="display: block; border: none; height: 250px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; visibility: visible; width: 300px; background-color: transparent;" class=""><iframe width="300" height="250" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" vspace="0" hspace="0" allowtransparency="true" scrolling="no" id="aswift_0" name="aswift_0" style="border-width: 0px; left: 0px; ; top: 0px;" class=""></iframe></ins></ins></ins></div><div class="" data-para-count="379" data-total-count="7401" itemprop="articleBody" id="story-continues-4" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width: 540px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Google was already suspicious that its internal traffic could be read, and had started a program to encrypt the links among its internal data centers, “the last chink in our armor,” Mr. Grosse said. But the slide
gave the company proof that it was a regular target of the N.S.A. “It was useful to have proof, in terms of accelerating a project already underway,” he said.</div><div class="" data-para-count="336" data-total-count="7737" itemprop="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width: 540px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Facebook and Yahoo have also been encrypting traffic among their internal servers. And Facebook, Google and Microsoft have been moving to more strongly encrypt consumer traffic with so-called <a title="About the move." href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/22/twitter-toughening-its-security-to-thwart-government-snoops/" style="color: rgb(50, 104, 145);" class="">Perfect Forward Secrecy</a>, specifically devised to make it more labor intensive for the N.S.A. or anyone to read stored encrypted
communications.</div><div class="" data-para-count="282" data-total-count="8019" itemprop="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width: 540px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">One of the biggest indirect consequences from the Snowden revelations, technology executives say, has been the surge in demands from foreign governments that saw what kind of access to user information the N.S.A. received — voluntarily or surreptitiously. Now they want the same.</div><div class="" data-para-count="138" data-total-count="8157" itemprop="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width: 540px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">At Facebook, Joe Sullivan, the company’s chief security officer, said it had been fending
off those demands and heightened expectations.</div><div class="" data-para-count="338" data-total-count="8495" itemprop="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width: 540px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Until last year, technology companies were forbidden from acknowledging demands from the United States government under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But in January, Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft brokered a deal with the Obama administration to disclose the number of such orders they receive in increments of 1,000.</div><div class="" data-para-count="125" data-total-count="8620" itemprop="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width: 540px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">As
part of the agreement, the companies agreed to dismiss their lawsuits before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court</div><div class="" data-para-count="125" data-total-count="8620" itemprop="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width: 540px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><span style="line-height: 1.4375rem; text-transform: uppercase;">“We’re not running and hiding,” Mr. Sullivan said. “We think it should be a transparent process so that people can judge the appropriate ways to handle these kinds of things.”</span></div><div class="" data-para-count="307" data-total-count="9112" itemprop="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width: 540px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">The latest
move in the war between intelligence agencies and technology companies arrived this week, in the form of a new Google encryption tool. The company released a user-friendly, email encryption method to replace the clunky and often mistake-prone encryption schemes the N.S.A. has readily exploited.</div><div class="" data-para-count="187" data-total-count="9299" itemprop="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 135px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; width: 540px; max-width: 540px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">But the best part of the tool was buried in Google’s code, which included a jab at the N.S.A.’s smiley-face slide. The code included the phrase: “ssl-added-and-removed-here-; - )”</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 19px; font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif; font-style: normal; background-color: transparent;" class=""><br class=""
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