What does this mean to a regular person like me? How can this affect my personal life? And is there any changes that needs to be done? Or we are all helpless infront of the CIA spying capabilities?
What does this mean to us as a community? This incident reveals a serious rape of people's privacy, so is there any action that should be done to stop this? Either by people of US or by the government?
First, as a regular person, operate under the assumption that nothing you do online (and perhaps in public) is private. To be fair, we should have been doing that even before this latest leak. I guarantee the US government is not the only state doing this. Likely any foreign government with sufficient resources is already doing the same things.
As developers, I second what @maruru has said. Focus on security first. If possible this should involve a subject matter expert. If not, focus on securing your data at every step of the process, from client to server and back.
Also, as a community we can support advocates for encryption and fight the constant attempts to weaken or demonize encryption by our various governments.
Marco Alka
Software Engineer, Technical Consultant & Mentor
What does the leak mean?
It means, that if you, in the years 2013-2016, owned
, you could be spied on and anything you encrypted over the internet could be read before encryption happened. Also, you could have mysteriously got killed, because of
Also:
Source
How can we stop this?
The only way to do so is write secure applications with cryptography first, UX/performance second. In order to write secure applications, more people would have to study the subject and implement correct algorithms and use better memory management (which is one of the most used bugs). Also configurations should be done carefully, ideally by an expert (not some random guy who has read a tutorial online)
That's one of the reasons why I love Redox. It is based on the memory-secure Rust-Lang and tries to clean up lots of UNIX clutter. I am following the project development and hope that I can replace my Linux with Redox one day (PC, laptop and phone)