NSA has contributed to Android source code

[Brian Stirling]

Pretty boring news, this is just an off shoot of SELinux, which was also developed at NSA. They even tell you all about it on their page.

http://www.nsa.gov/research/selinux/

Coincidentally, there was a huge stink a few years ago about SELinux, because it was perceived as the government helping one vendor over another. IMO, it should be exempt since SELinux is open source and thus free for use by anyone, including Microsoft or whomever.

News about SEAndroid predates this news by a long period of time, NSA announced it. It's not news.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/248275/nsa_releases_a_securityenhanced_version_of_android.html

That said, I'm in agreement with some of the other posters. Once the government can tap into the Internet backbone (which any nation is going to be able to do), there is no privacy. I don't think there's any way to put that cat back in the bag anywhere in the world, if you have communications that really need to be secure from any prying eyes, then use a real encryption scheme. IE, use AES or RSA encryption on all your sensitive communications.

The various governments appear to be doing an 'I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine' thing by getting others to be the direct link in snooping. When Germany wanted info about one of there own they went to the NSA and similarly, if we want info on one of ours we have others we can go to that have it and not worry about the 4th amendment because we didn't intercept it -- merely looked at what someone else intercepted.

The problem I have with folks that dismiss this is that this is all government needs to justify doing it. This would not be the first time in history when a people let there government do things they knew or should have known was against the law.

When they can remotely turn your GPS on and watch, in real time, where you are and what you're doing it's hardly a stretch to say we've gone beyond anything Orwell could have imagined.

When we moved to teletype the privacy provisions were extended to this new medium even though the founding fathers could not have imagined it. And this continued with each new communication technology until quite recently and now the default position of government is that the new communications methods were not part of our founding concepts so no protections are required.

We let this happen...


Brian