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posted by janrinok on Thursday June 04 2015, @11:53PM   Printer-friendly

THE NATIONAL SECURITY Agency knows Edward Snowden disclosed many of its innermost secrets when he revealed how aggressive its surveillance tactics are. What it doesn't know is just how much information the whistle-blower took with him when he left.

For all of its ability to track our telecommunications, the NSA seemingly has little clue exactly what documents, or even how many documents, Snowden gave to the media. Like most large organizations, the NSA had tools in place to track who accessed what data and when. But Snowden, a system administrator, apparently was able to cover his tracks by deleting or modifying the log files that tracked that access.

An Estonian company called Guardtime says it has a solution to that: using the same ideas that underpin the digital currency Bitcoin, the company says it can ensure no one can alter digital files, not even an organization's most senior executives or IT managers. The idea is to stop the next Snowden in his tracks by making it impossible to tamper with data, such as the NSA log files, in secret.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 05 2015, @09:43AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 05 2015, @09:43AM (#192435)

    Doesn't stop someone taking records who doesn't care about being logged that such transactions have taken place. Might reduce the window of opportunity if anyone's actually monitoring and acting upon such logs realtime as opposed to logs merely being collected for an after-the-event analysis.