Did NSA Know About, and Exploit Heartbleed for Years?

As Americans we expect our government to protect us. However, in recent months we have found that the National Security Agency, the NSA, has been spying on Americans in a wide variety of ways. One of those was over the internet. Now, thanks to new information, we are finding out that the NSA not only knew about the Heartbleed bug that has affected many websites but also used it to obtain intelligence.

The report from Bloomberg states that the NSA knew about Heartbleed for two years and did nothing about it, opting instead to exploit it. Using Heartbleed, the NSA obtained passwords and other data to build portfolios on users. Their failure to properly act has left millions of users across the internet vulnerable to attack from hackers and foreign governments, things the NSA should be stopping.

If this report is true and the NSA had knowledge of Heartbleed and did nothing then they have failed in their basic mission of defense. Their first commitment is to defending the United States from attack. That includes cyber-attacks from foreign nations and hackers from around the world.

The job of the NSA in this kind of matter is to see if the bug can be exploited, gain intelligence for a set amount of time and then inform software companies and the like so it can be fixed. However, for two years the NSA kept Heartbleed a secret and exploited it for their own purposes, predominantly for spying on Americans.

President Obama recently suggested reforms in the wake of the NSA spying news. Among those was the requirement to stop using bugs like Heartbleed to spy and start alerting software companies about their presence. The report stated that the NSA has thousands of similar vulnerabilities which can be used to infiltrate computers around the world. Of course, the NSA states that these are needed to spot terrorist threats so the use of bugs like Heartbleed remains intact.

Welcome to America, where the Fourth Amendment is being violated without your knowledge. All of your private information on your cell phone and computer is vulnerable and is being collected by the NSA all in the name of security. If that doesn’t make you feel weird one can only imagine the things they are doing that we aren’t being told about.