It's hard to like the NSA today. The enormous surveillance agency has come under a lot of scrutiny after Edward Snowden revealed how large its network of surveillance tools actually was. On top of that, the group is still trying to get into users' devices via security backdoors. However, is the NSA acting lawfully and in the most effective way for serving the American citizen?
These are the questions that NSA director Mike Rogers tried to answer during his appearance at the New America Foundation on Monday, according to The Guardian. Cryptographers, tech security officers and national security reporters all gathered at the NAF in order to question Rogers about the NSA's current policies regarding security and technology.
According to Rogers, the recent cyber-attack on Sony from North Korea is clear evidence of the need for the NSA's surveillance, and of how difficult it is to protect one's self against cyberthreats.
When asked about the presence of backdoors, Rogers responded defensively.
"Backdoor is not the context I would use because when I hear the phrase 'backdoor' I think, 'Well, this is kind of shady, why wouldn't you want to go in the front door, be very public?' We can create a legal framework for how we do this," he said.
Rogers was very forward about his desire to create a legal and technical framework that would allow the NSA access to company and user data. However, he did express a desire to build such a framework without opening companies up to the danger of other online groups manipulating the backdoors to cause damage.
Rogers did agree that the government's ability to infiltrate U.S.-based company computers is a threat to their rights, but Rogers believed that the external cyberthreats presented a bigger danger than the NSA's access to a computer.
When Yahoo Information Security Officer Alex Stamos heard Rogers express his support for "defects/backdoors, or golden master keys," he challenged the validity of such a method. Stamos asked how companies like Yahoo, who have users all over the world, could handle parallel requests for access to Yahoo's backdoor. Stamos compared such security loopholes to "drilling a hole in a windshield."
Rogers tried to move away from the implications of Stamos' question, by saying, "We have world-class cryptographers at the National Security Agency. I think that [backdoors] are technically feasible. Now it needs to be done within a framework."
