NEW YORK, NY Sept. 5 (DPI) — The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal came out with more reports today on the National Security Agency’s growing aptitude at decrypting virtually any data on the internet.

And while several readers howled about the implications to online privacy, more and more readers are concluding that online surveillance in the digital age is inevitable.

“It’s amazing that people will share every detail of their lives on Facebook and Twitter, allow Google to scan every single email they send from their Android phone or on Gmail and then are up all night worrying that the government might look at their messages,” wrote one reader today on NYTimes.com. The Times site posted nearly 400 comments in less than two hours Thursday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html?hp

Many of those comments were much more nuanced and analytical about the NSA’s surveillance activities, at least compared with the weeks following the defection of whistleblower Edward Snowden. And some felt the NY Times report didn’t provide enough specifics to indict the NSA:

(48 Recommendations, Editor Recommended on NYTimes.com) This article is nothing but a mess of generalities.

It mentioned PGP. It never mentioned whether PGP is still secure (it is). It mentioned the NSA internal e-mail that said “This can’t be good.” But did not elaborate.

As someone with extensive experience in cryptography and security, I want to point out a few things. Nobody, not even the NSA can arbitrarily crack anything. When done correctly, even if the NSA set every computer on the planet to work on brute-forcing an encrypted message, it won’t be done in the next million years. If the NSA is able to break into communications, it does so through less magical means, like using a National Security Letter to demand that data be handed over, stealing a key from a user, even having agents who physically pilfer keys and data. While the NYT does make mentions of these alternate methods, it muddies it all up and fails to draw distinctions.

E.g.: the weaknesses in NSA-sanctioned algorithms like AES and SHA that the article alluded to? Yes, those can make brute-force cracking go much faster, but the attacks aren’t practical because they will STILL take millions of years (if not much more).

The NSA story is important, and deserves the attention of the public. But the NYT does nobody a favor by presenting an article so fraught with technical ignorance that makes it sound like all encryption is down the drain (they’re not) or that no web transactions are private (most still are) and that the sky is falling (nope).

(NYTimes.com) This is a complicated issue. On the one hand, law-abiding citizens of the US and other countries rely on Internet encryption to protect financial and other personal information. On the other, Internet encryption allows groups like al Qaeda the communicate freely without free of being intercepted. It is worth remembering that had the US and the UK not been able to break German and Japanese encryption systems during World War II the outcome of that conflict might have been very different. It seems to me that it is in the US national interest for NSA to be able to access encrypted Internet communications, so long as they do so only in accordance with US law.

(NYTimes.com Recommended) To all the people who are surprised at this “revelation”, do you know nothing about world history? Are you really that ignorant? Let me educate you briefly – the US, British (and German and Russian) governments have been cracking encryption (with and without help) since before WWI, refined it to a science during WWII, and turned it into an art form in the Cold War and afterwards. Did all you folks really think that the government couldn’t crack the weak a_s encryption used in commercial products today when they’ve been cracking military grade encryption for more than decades? Get real folks! Life goes on. Children are born, grow old, and die. None of your stuff is that secret anyway. The government isn’t wasting its time to see what you had for lunch last week and what friend you are badmouthing. The government thinks it is looking out for you, in the ham-handed, misguided way they’ve always done it.

It’s amazing that people will share every detail of their lives on Facebook and Twitter, allow Google to scan every single email they send from their Android phone or on Gmail and then are up all night worrying that the government might look at their messages. So many other people are already looking at your communications, with your willing consent, might as well let the government in on the fun.

Even a Wall Street Journal report today on the same development – headlined “NSA Can Crack Much Internet Encryption” — generated zero reader comments in the hour after the article was posted.