A European Parliament study has recommended that the EU finance open source audits and bug bounties in order to improve privacy in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations. The study was led by a dozen European security experts and concluded “EU should promote and foster the development and usage of open protocols, open implementations and open systems in general.”Specifically, the report encourages aide to specific important open source projects and uses the example TrueCrypt, a disk encryption application that recently crowd-funded an audit to ensure there were no NSA backdoors in the software. Suggestions also included regulating ISPs to require them to encrypt portions of their network, adopting regulations that require cloud service providers to offer a standard level of security and privacy settings by default, and promoting the use of encryption products wherever possible.
