THE Reuters reported this week that Apple, Google and Mozilla have taken reasonable steps to prevent the Kazakh government create a surveillance system over the internet using Safari, Chrome and Firefox browsers.
Surveillance, according to Motherboard, it happens as follows: through an encrypted certificate that the government of Kazakhstan forced its citizens to download, it was possible to intercept Facebook, Twitter, Google and passwords of basically the entire population.
That’s because, a root certificate (root) is a file that, when installed in the browser, can read all encrypted traffic.
The problem is that the government of Kazakhstan, however, is not a reliable authority and has a history of using extensive surveillance powers.
Earlier this month, Kazakhstan said it had suspended the implementation of such a system, the initial launch of which was described as a test.
The country’s security officials said the aim of the system was to protect Kazakhstan users from «hacker attacks, online fraud and other types of cyber threats».
The system has been suspended, but could be deployed again if any national security threat emerges in the form of cyber attacks and information, according to the Kazakhstan National Security Committee.
Apple, Google and Mozilla then decided to block the certificate issued by the government, hampering their plans.
An Apple spokesman gave the following statement to ZDNet:
Apple believes that privacy is a fundamental human right and we design all products to protect personal information.
We take steps to ensure that the certificate is not trusted by Safari and that our users are protected from this issue.
According to Motherboard, a possible measure that the government of Kazakhstan could take is to require the download of its own personalized browser with the certificate already installed, instead of relying on companies like Apple, Google, Mozilla and Microsoft to allow the use of its certificate.
We will see how this story unfolds.
Image: Shutterstock.com
