A different kind of “enabling”

U.S. Government agencies charged with “protecting” us are, according to reports, working long and hard to make sure that our on-line activities are not protected.  Documents released by former intell officer Edward Snowden indicate that NSA is sabotaging all kinds of measures intended to make the internet safe for communications and commerce.  According to the documents, the agency has built “backdoors” into systems, to enable it to circumvent security, and has even broken the SSL protocols that encrypt a lot of our on-line activity.  A “Sigint Enabling Project” costing $254.9 million a year “actively engages the U.S. and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products’ designs” to make them “exploitable” or hackable, according to the documents.  Google pushed back on the assertion of an NSA back door into its system, but the company admitted “We provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law.”  (It didn’t say whose interpretation of the law it abides by.)