White House to Allow NSA to Exploit Some Internet Security Flaws

The White House has weighed in on the Heartbleed bug and its reported exploitation by the NSA.

In a New York Times report on Saturday, senior administration officials said that President Obama has decided that when the NSA discovers major flaws in Internet security, it should reveal them to the general public to insure that they will be fixed, but not in the event of "a clear national security or law enforcement need" — a loophole that will likely allow the NSA to continue to exploit security flaws.

This news comes after anonymous sources told Bloomberg that the NSA knew about the Heartbleed bug that exposed a major vulnerability in security protocols used by many popular websites like Google and Facebook, and used it to gather intelligence for at least two years. The White House and the NSA have since denied that report. Read more...