Recent news of the U.S. National Security Agency hacking millions of sites had led for Internet experts to form a panel to rewrite Web security.
Reuters reported that Internet experts who have worked with NSA in creating the security standards were also disappointed as the government keeps limiting their movements to ensure the agency can still break in the sites. The government seemed to value monitoring over users' security.
"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 to Reuters. "We thought they would never be crazy enough to shoot out the ground they were standing on, and now we're not so sure."
A panel is being formed now, consisting of Internet experts volunteers, in aim to boost Internet security by adding better encryption on Https sites. This move is to ensure that the hackers and the NSA would not be able to break in easily.
It was former NSA contractor Edward Snowden who had revealed to the public about the government manipulating security standards to easily get the information it needs on a target account. Since then, private networks, banks, and other sites believed to be secured were no longer secured after all.
NSA responded through its office of the Director of National Intelligence that it is part of the agency's job to protect users from "terrorists, cybercriminals, human traffickers and others."
The promise of a "rewrite on Web security" will not be easy for the panel especially that they are not involving the government. Different reasons were raised such as the companies more concerned on its interests than the users, the small number of mathematical experts not associated to NSA, and the governments in various countries prohibiting virtual private networks.
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