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I think the author is extremely misguided. 1) Iceland is not a safe harbor from the NSA. Iceland is fully within the U.S. orbit. Iceland, actually does not mai

I think the author is extremely misguided. 1) Iceland is not a safe harbor from the NSA. Iceland is fully within the U.S. orbit. Iceland, actually does not maintain a standing army and its defense is the responsibility of the U.S. In addition, banking is a significant portion of Iceland's economy, and thus vulnerable to the U.S. cutting of access to SWIFT. Basically, if the U.S. really wants something from Iceland, it will be able to get it. 2) By making the front page of HN, the author is sure to have been noticed by somebody at the NSA. Because, the NSA has pretty broad authorizations for intercepting and decrypting foreign messages (that is actually why they exist), there is a very good chance that they are probably reading the author's email right now. If the email server had been in the U.S., there would have been at least some political/legal considerations about reading the email. By being in Iceland, there are none, and I am sure the author's email presented a very easy challenge (and probably is the butt of an inside joke about how this naive person thought their setup was NSA-proof)

dcposch 11y ago
> Iceland is not a safe harbor from the NSA A lot of crypto nerds have this fantasy of "NSA-proofing" themselves or their information. That's near impossible. If the NSA cares enough about someone specifically to use, say, tools from the TAO catalog, they will be able to find out what they want to know. (See http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/a-941262.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/a-941262.html ). The FBI also has powerful targeted surveillance tools. Targeted surveillance is often legitimate, anyway. Authorities have suspicion that someone is, say, planning an attack or running a cartel, or someone is a suspect in murder case. It's good that powerful tool exist to find the truth. I think the right goal is to stop mass surveillance. Mass surveillance the continuous monitoring of whole populations at a time. Mass surveillance is illegitimate and a threat to liberal democracy. That leads to a totally different approach. Moving your own personal email server to Iceland does nothing at all to prevent mass surveillance (and honestly doesn't protect you from targeted surveillance either, as others have pointed out). To roll back mass surveillance, both in the US and around the world, we need tools that are clean and simple and easy to use, even for people who have never heard of a "key" or a "cipher" and don't care what those are. We need to make things like end-to-end encryption, forward secrecy, and metadata security available by default. Signal and WhatsApp are the biggest success stories so far. Moxie is the boss.

dcposch 11y ago

> Iceland is not a safe harbor from the NSA A lot of crypto nerds have this fantasy of "NSA-proofing" themselves or their information. That's near impossible. If the NSA cares enough about someone specifically to use, say, tools from the TAO catalog, they will be able to find out what they want to know. (See http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/a-941262.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/a-941262.html ). The FBI also has powerful targeted surveillance tools. Targeted surveillance is often legitimate, anyway. Authorities have suspicion that someone is, say, planning an attack or running a cartel, or someone is a suspect in murder case. It's good that powerful tool exist to find the truth. I think the right goal is to stop mass surveillance. Mass surveillance the continuous monitoring of whole populations at a time. Mass surveillance is illegitimate and a threat to liberal democracy. That leads to a totally different approach. Moving your own personal email server to Iceland does nothing at all to prevent mass surveillance (and honestly doesn't protect you from targeted surveillance either, as others have pointed out). To roll back mass surveillance, both in the US and around the world, we need tools that are clean and simple and easy to use, even for people who have never heard of a "key" or a "cipher" and don't care what those are. We need to make things like end-to-end encryption, forward secrecy, and metadata security available by default. Signal and WhatsApp are the biggest success stories so far. Moxie is the boss.