Bruce Schneier: U.S. enables Chinese hacking of Google

Notable cryptographer^† and security expert Bruce Schneier has a new essay up at CNN.

In order to comply with government search warrants on user data,Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access.

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This problem isn’t going away. Every year brings more Internet censorship and control, not just in countries like China and Iran but in the U.S., the U.K., Canada and other free countries, egged on by both law enforcement trying to catch terrorists, child pornographers and other criminals and by media companies trying to stop file sharers.

The problem is that such control makes us all less safe. Whether the eavesdroppers are the good guys or the bad guys, these systems put us all at greater risk. Communications systems that have no inherent eavesdropping capabilities are more secure than systems with those capabilities built in. And it’s bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state.

Read the entire article at CNN.com. This essay is a follow-up to a previous Schneier essay, “Technology Shouldn’t Give Big Brother a Head Start”.

^†Schneier is the inventor of the Blowfish and TwoFish block cypher algorithms as well as the Solitair cypher used in Neil Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. TwoFish was a finalist to become the NSA’s advanced encryption standard (AES) but ultimately lost the competition to Rijndael.