Re:Was the iOS SSL Flaw Deliberate?
by mikeash on Thursday February 27, 2014 @11:45AM
(#7313166)
Breaking your jaw is most definitely not cheaper. Not by a long shot.
The NSA could, for example, compromise Comcast routers, use this bug to MITM every single SSL connection to e-mail servers, and collect literally millions of people's credentials and messages.
The cost of doing the equivalent with "break my jaw" techniques is astronomical. You'd need massive manpower, huge facilities, and of course the public backlash would be almost incomprehensibly vast.
Programmers of all people should be able to understand that an automated, computerized solution can be applied to a large scale extremely cheaply, and that this is pretty much the only way to scale up to millions of users. In the NSA's case, it's targets instead of users, but the same principle applies.
The NSA wants all of the data. Technological measures is how to obtain it, and that's what they've been doing.
The NSA could, for example, compromise Comcast routers, use this bug to MITM every single SSL connection to e-mail servers, and collect literally millions of people's credentials and messages.
The cost of doing the equivalent with "break my jaw" techniques is astronomical. You'd need massive manpower, huge facilities, and of course the public backlash would be almost incomprehensibly vast.
Programmers of all people should be able to understand that an automated, computerized solution can be applied to a large scale extremely cheaply, and that this is pretty much the only way to scale up to millions of users. In the NSA's case, it's targets instead of users, but the same principle applies.
The NSA wants all of the data. Technological measures is how to obtain it, and that's what they've been doing.