Twitter Adds Security Layer to Block Snooping after Edward Snowden Revelations

Twitter has tightened the encryption of its traffic in order to prevent online snooping by governments and other agencies.

The move follows whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations about the US government's global surveillance programmes.

"As part of our continuing effort to keep our users' information as secure as possible, we're happy to announce that we recently enabled forward secrecy for traffic on twitter.com, api.twitter.com, and mobile.twitter.com," the company said in a blog.

Internet giants Google and Facebook earlier added a security feature called 'perfect forward secrecy' to their services after former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Snowden revealed that the agency tracked people's online activity using their platforms.

"On top of the usual confidentiality and integrity properties of HTTPS, forward secrecy adds a new property. If an adversary is currently recording all Twitter users' encrypted traffic, and they later crack or steal Twitter's private keys, they should not be able to use those keys to decrypt the recorded traffic," Twitter said.

"We are writing this not just to discuss an interesting piece of technology, but to present what we believe should be the new normal for web service owners," Twitter added.

"A year and a half ago, Twitter was first served completely over HTTPS," the company added. "Since then, it has become clearer and clearer how important that step was to protecting our users' privacy."

Edward Snowden NSA Scandal

Snowden, a former contractor at the NSA, has leaked top secret documents about a global programme of surveillance by Washington. He is currently in exile in Russia.

The documents revealed that the NSA has been tapping telephone conversations and spying on the internet activity of citizens, leaders, bureaucrats, businesses and government agencies.

According to the documents, the NSA spied on overseas data transmissions between computer centres operated by internet giants such as Google and Yahoo.

The revelations prompted companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, AOL and Facebook to support legislation to put an end to the NSA's surveillance programmes.