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A state actor who can sniff traffic can just as easily serve a secret order to the email server operator to compel them to hand over the data. In fact this is a
by magila 11y ago
A state actor who can sniff traffic can just as easily serve a secret order to the email server operator to compel them to hand over the data. In fact this is already SOP for governments when dealing with communications which are encrypted in-flight but not end-to-end.
- jamespo 11y agodepends where those servers are based and who owns them
- Kadin 11y agoExcept that's demonstrably not what the NSA was doing; they were sniffing the backbones at the switches, presumably because they didn't want to create any sort of paper trail or get warrants, even secret FISA ones, against particular people. From Google's perspective, it means they have to be involved, however non-consensually, in the process, rather than having it done to them transparently. So I can see why it's a win for them. Whether it really matters to Joe Random User is arguable. What Joe User really ought to demand is end-to-end encryption rather than transit encryption, but he's unlikely to do that because key management across multiple devices (and who wants to read their email only on a single device?) is a pain and the companies that would be able to make it less of a pain aren't exactly incentivized to do so.