"We had the assumption that they could use their capacity to make weak standards, but that would make everyone in the U.S. insecure," said Johns Hopkins cryptography professor Matthew Green. "We thought they would never be crazy enough to shoot out the ground they were standing on, and now we're not so sure."
"This is one instance of the dangers that we face in the networked age," said Jari Arkko, an Ericsson scientist who chairs the Internet Engineering Task Force. "We have to respond to the new threats."
Green and others said a great number of security protocols needed to be written "from scratch" without government help.
Mike Belshe, a former Google engineer who has spearheaded the IETF drive to encrypt regular Web traffic, said that his plan had been "watered down" in the committee process during the past few years as some companies looked after their own interests more than users.
"A lot of our foundational technologies for securing the Net have come through the government," said researcher Dan Kaminsky, famed for finding a critical flaw in the way users are steered to the website they seek. "They have the best minds in the country, but their advice is now suspect."
"As much as I want to say this is a technology problem we can address, if the nation states decide security isn't something we're allowed to have, then we're in trouble," Kaminsky said. "If security is outlawed, only outlaws will have security."
http://news.yahoo.com/internet-experts-want-security-revamp-nsa-revelations-020838711--sector.html
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