What the NSA / Snowden fiasco tells us

So the NSA is uptight that their super secret spying system has been exposed.  I always wondered how much they listened in but was very shocked at the volume. Now, two encrypted email services have shut down rather than have to provide access to emails.  When we think about this what does this tell us?  There is no backdoor in encryption that the NSA has fostered...

For many years people have surmised that the NSA had built in secret backdoors into the NSA approved encryption algorithms.  When the US government decided to no longer classify these as munitions, many thought it was because the NSA had a backdoor key.   However, if there was a backdoor then the NSA would not have to resort to demanding access to the emails from lavabit.  They could just soak them in as they passed through the ISP and decrypt at their leisure.

Another effect of this is now much of the IT infrastructure in the rest of the world has started looking for non US based cloud solutions.  They are not interested in exposing their data or their customer's data to the NSA. That's lots of corporate money and potential tax dollars that just went bye bye.

I predict that NSA's pursuit of Edward Snowden will contribute to more encryption being used in the world.  This will nullify the NSA's desire effect of being able to read all the communications in the clear.


We will see what the future brings.