Snowden’s Leaks Finally Forced Companies to Enhance Security

Last week, Google, Microsoft and five other leading Web companies formally requested that the U.S. government rein in its use of dragnet surveillance. These companies don’t have to wait for the government to act, though. Encryption technology can protect the privacy of innocent users from indiscriminate surveillance, but only if tech companies deploy it. In the wake of the Snowden disclosures, they are starting to do so. It shouldn’t have taken them this long.

In October 2010, security researcher Eric Butler released an easy-to-use tool designed to hack into the webmail accounts of people using public Wi-Fi networks. Butler’s Firesheep wasn’t the first technology to make Wi-Fi sniffing possible, but it made it easy to intercept emails and documents, and even to capture authentication cookies that could be used at a later time to log in to a victim’s account. Read more...