29 ms·

Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

174 points by pje 10y ago

indlebe 10y ago
Moxie's been a huge inspiration for me in tech, i first discovered him through his blog post Career Advice: https://moxie.org/blog/career-advice/ https://moxie.org/blog/career-advice/
- nurmara 10y ago
  I've read this blog post multiple times over the past few months and I wish I knew about it before I went to college. His career advice has so much clarity that I can't find elsewhere (so far). Thanks for sharing the link. I'm about to do a career switch and reading this again is certainly reassuring. He is right. We are what we do for a living. I find his work very inspirational and I hope I'll be able to personally thank him one day for all the work he has done.
  - domusliber 10y ago
    If you don't mind me asking, what career are you switching from and to? I'm about to graduate but I'm not looking forward to any of my default career options. I'd be curious to hear about your experience and plans.
    - nurmara 10y ago
      I'm about to graduate from medical school in a few months. Once I get my medical degree, I'm going for an undergraduate degree in Computer Science. I've always wanted to do computer science since high school but I equally wanted to become a doctor. At one point I decided being a doctor was more important. I valued autonomy highly and I figured nothing is better than the freedom to operate my own small private practice in the future. I didn't want to end up being employed as a programmer and I expected that being a freelancer is no where near as stable in terms of job prospects as being a doctor, especially on the long run. Add to that the fact that I was fascinated by how the human body works for the same reasons I was fascinated with computers. I think any hacker-minded person would. I wanted to know the ins and outs of the human body. I wanted to know how it breaks, and how to fix it. Also, to be honest, I was very tempted with the extra income that comes with medical practice, but autonomy was ultimately the primary motive. 6 Years later, here I am, graduating with a decent GPA but having 0% interest in pursuing clinical practice, although i have performed very well clinically and in terms of my medical knowledge. I simply realized that the practice of medicine (specifically diagnostics and treatment decisions) is nothing but a classification problem. We are literally trained to memorize 'algorithms' (flow charts) for diagnosing and managing hundreds of different illnesses. That's about it really. It boils down to asking a standard set of questions (the patient's history), examining the patient, and trying to guess the diagnosis. Often, lab tests are needed (you order them based on the flow chart you memorized for the presenting symptoms). Once they're available, the diagnosis is usually clear, or further testing and imaging is required, and the cycle continues. Even for the complicated medical issues, this whole process can be represented by a simple flowchart that easily fits on an A4 sheet). The majority of modern day work done by doctors can (and will) be automated in the near future. The biggest hurdle was never the technology; it's the laws and regulations. I've seen papers published in the 80s where AI bested human doctors in diagnosing many diseases, and recently I've seen more impressive results in radiology and pathology diagnostics, where the diagnosis purely depends on vision, which is a very complicated problem when you try to solve it with computers. The results are very promising and some papers have shown results where human pathologists and radiologists were outperformed by computer vision. Humans are obviously still needed to deal with patients. It takes some clinical skill to know how to extract information from patients, how to examine them, and how to look for clues, but that does not strictly require a doctor to be done properly. In fact, most of our medical training, even in residency, is concerned with learning more and more 'algorithms', guidelines, and staying up to date with the latest medical evidence. Computers won't replace doctors in surgical specialties, but they certainly will replace primary care physicians, as well as doctors in other fields like internal medicine (including its subspecialties like cardiology, Pulmonology, etc), emergency medicine, oncology, and others. These fields purely depend on memorizing and recalling flow charts of diagnosis and management. Humans are fallible when it comes to memory and recall, computers are much much less fallible in these cases, and virtually infallible in some cases (100% diagnostic sensitivity and specificity was reported in some studies, which is impossible to achieve by humans) By the time I realized what I mentioned above, I was already close to finishing med school. I decided to graduate first then see what I wanted to do next. I no longer saw any inherent joy or value in being a doctor. There is no room for trying to be creative, smart, or efficient. You just have to follow the official guidelines and policies, and hope you don't get sued when you, inevitably, make a mistake. I see no meaning in a career like that. I love coding and I love learning CS in my free time so my decision for what to do next was easy. There are some interesting studies utilizing AI for diagnosing cancer metastasis on CT scans using computer vision, and that's an example of a topic I might be interested in. I don't necessarily want to do medically related research all the time though. All I want to do is to be a software engineer working on very interesting projects. Even the most mundane coding projects are easily 10x more mentally stimulating than clinical work in my opinion. In retrospect, I have no regrets. I know a lot about how my body works and I leanred a lot from dealing with hundreds of patients over the years. I also learned a lot about who I am and what I really want, and to me, this knowledge is invaluable. I also realized how much I appreciated computer science. I guess that's enough rambling. Apologies for the late and long reply. I hope you found it useful, and I wish you the best of luck in your future career ;)
      - pfg 10y ago
        This was very interesting and insightful to read, thanks!
        nurmara 10y ago
        You're welcome :)
ex3ndr 10y ago
Not for everyone, their crypto is GPL only and GPL can't be deployed everywhere.
- wtbob 10y ago
  > Not for everyone, their crypto is GPL only and GPL can't be deployed everywhere. GPL code can be used anywhere; GPL code cannot be made proprietary.
  - sandebert 10y ago
    Well, no. You could have a situation where there's a policy in place forbidding installing GPL-licensed products. (I don't have any info about it, but I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case at Microsoft a while ago.) EDIT: I'm getting downvotes and don't understand why. I'm seriously interested, can someone explain the reason?
    - a3_nm 10y ago
      That's the fault of the people making that policy, not the fault of the people licensing the code under GPL.
      - andrewflnr 10y ago
        Pointing the finger somewhere different doesn't change the practical reality. The only question there is how likely a GPL ban is to actually affect you (seems small to me, to be honest, but I don't know).
        belorn 10y ago
        If we are talking about probability, I have heard more times that a developer is working in a place which forbids all non-approved software from being installed and used on work computers. One web developer could not even install an alternate web browser to test the code that they wrote. Anything that is not a code snippet that is considered so small as to not be copyrightable was banned. Of course, their market wasn't very competitive and thus they could have such policy without much risk. In more competitive areas like games, companies like blizzard has shown to use any license that is compatible with their business model, and in some cases, directly asked developer for exceptions. In that kind of market, a ideology based policy doesn't work and would only give ground to the competition.
circuit_breaker 10y ago
Watch his documentary "Hold Fast" to get a glimpse of just how unique and interesting a character he is. Anarchists yachting? Yes, more, please
- youngbullind 10y ago
  Such a good film.
- goldenkey 10y ago
  Thanks, definitely was worth watching. What an awesome crew.
- spurgu 10y ago
  Whoa. I've watched that documentary a few times before but never realized it's Moxie.
- j_s 10y ago
  https://vimeo.com/15351476 https://vimeo.com/15351476
- pureIDEOLOGY 10y ago
  If that's his autobiographical documentary, I'll pass. Never seen a more narcissistic piece of trash in my life. He won't stop talking in his monotonous voice the whole time--made it to the first scene where he films a conversation, but had to cut it off because even that he had to overdub--guy loooooves the sound of his own voice.
vechernyaya 10y ago
Oh the irony of an article about encryption on a site sans encryption.
- dbalan 10y ago
  Its incredibly hard for publishers to do https, where main revenue is from serving third party content embedded inside. Wired has nice article about their efforts going https https://www.wired.com/2016/04/wired-launching-https-security-upgrade/ https://www.wired.com/2016/04/wired-launching-https-security...
  - vechernyaya 10y ago
    Nice article. Thanks, dbalan!
- ScottBurson 10y ago
  Huh? I'm connecting over HTTPS right now. Have you tried it?
  - BGZq7 10y ago
    When I try, I get a certificate that expired 5 months ago. www.popsci.com uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate expired on 12/10/2015 05:59 PM. The current time is 05/11/2016 01:39 AM. Error code: SEC_ERROR_EXPIRED_CERTIFICATE
  - vechernyaya 10y ago
    I don't get HTTPS :( http://i.imgur.com/TByP8XM.png?1 http://i.imgur.com/TByP8XM.png?1 dbalan's explanation is quite legit. Hope they get there.
  - tombrossman 10y ago
    How are you connecting to the site? Genuinely curious as it definitely does not support HTTPS which the sibling comments confirm. Are you on a work computer with proxied MITM certificates, maybe some badly-configured security software (like Superfish), or something else? It would be good to know why this is happening.
blablablaat 10y ago
Not for people who don't want Google on their device. He only wants distribution via Google, and even went as far to demand that free/libre Play-alternative F-droid removed their build of TextSecure. See: https://fdroid.eutopia.cz/ https://fdroid.eutopia.cz/
- AtticHacker 10y ago
  Huge deal breaker for me, regrettably.
  - lisper 10y ago
    You might want to try this then: https://github.com/Spark-Innovations/SC4 https://github.com/Spark-Innovations/SC4
  - feklar 10y ago
    Experiment with a reversed play services framework http://forum.xda-developers.com/android/apps-games/app-microg-gmscore-floss-play-services-t3217616 http://forum.xda-developers.com/android/apps-games/app-micro...
    - AtticHacker 10y ago
      I'm not familiar with this but it looks like an interesting project. My problem however is that I mainly do not like that GPL'd software isn't allowed to be redistributed. I might not be properly informed on this issue (and please correct me if I'm wrong) but from what I've read that seems to be the case.
      - simoncion 10y ago
        > I might not be properly informed on this issue. You're not. Here's an okay starting point into the discussion: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/issues/282 https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/issues/282 Another thing to remember is that (IIRC) -for approximately forever- Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been a Linux distro that's composed almost entirely of Open Source software, but prohibits folks who receive the binaries from redistributing them.
ashitlerferad 10y ago
Moxie makes encryption for the majority of people, not for everyone.
aavotins 10y ago
With people like Moxie the future doesn't look that bleak anymore. The guy is really dedicated to what he is doing and, quite honestly, it is pleasing to see someone in the tech community who is not egocentric around creating his online persona. I'm not trying to insult anyone, just expressing gratitude that there's people who care about code, not striving to become rock stars.
abalone 10y ago
I've respected Moxie Marlinspike ever since he made sslstrip, a simple illustration of the fundamental insecurity of browser-based HTTPS. However I do question his premise that criminals already have the wherewithal to opt in to "clunky" strong encryption before engaging in criminal activity. In fact there are many scenarios where criminals simply go with the default security configuration in consumer devices, either because they (a) did not plan the crime in advance or (b) aren't as smart about opsec as you might expect. There are many good arguments to make strong encryption the default for consumer devices, but here I feel he was attempting to take an easy way out by pretending it's orthogonal to investigating crimes. In fact it is a tradeoff, granting us security from cybercriminals and bad state actors (if there's even a difference), while making it harder for law enforcement in some scenarios.
- EdHominem 10y ago
  Right, not all criminals can choose secure defaults. But those who can't are unlikely to be all that secure in other ways either meaning that it won't change the threat landscape much. Besides, it wouldn't kill our LEOs to work for their supper. This reliance on dragnet tactics means that'll soon be all they're able to do.
- cJ0th 10y ago
  or (c) they don't have to care about it. "security by obscurity" might proves as being good enough. I could write you a text message: "Hey abalone, do you fancy helping me planting a tree over at my garden?" and it seems perfectly innocent until you consider that planting a tree could be a code for all sort of things. As long as you don't "plant trees" every week and talk about all kind of things in your text messages you are not attracting attention. One could argue that truly innocent/law abiding people require strong encryption the most because of all the criminals out there.
brianzelip 10y ago
Three cheers for Moxie!
xg15 10y ago
To be honest, I don't understand what substantial benefit end-to-end encryption actually brings in an environment of (almost-)mandatory updates. - If someone from Facebook/Telegram/Signal/etc wants to know what you're writing, they can just instruct their app (via update) to send them your key. For closed-source services, you'd theoretically have to decompile and audit each update to make sure they are not doing that. - If they want to know what you have written in the past, they can instruct the app to send them the conversation log. - If Google (or Apple or Microsoft, respectively) want to know what you're writing, they can instruct the OS to send them the data. (Google's "Android Backup Service" for example also backs up "third party settings and data" [1]. I don't know about the details of the backup service, but this shows to me it's quite possible that your key or conversation logs might even land accidentally on some providers' servers without them having any bad intent.) - If (three letter agency of your choice) wants to get the data, they can just force any of the above companies via NSLs to get it for them. - If any of the US strategic partners want to get the data, they can likely make a deal with an intelligence agency. - Lastly, if the messenger company wants to mine or sell user data, they still have a lot of stuff that cannot be encrypted for operational reasons (such as your contact list and the phone numbers of all your contacts). That leaves to me the only group for which "overlay encryption" brings an actual benefit political activists in a country not at all affiliated with the US - or highly knowledgeable individuals who carefully control which updates they get. Both groups are important to consider but likely had ways to protect their communication before. To actually protect communication not just from "the government" but also from the private industry, we would at least need some independent party to vet app updates. [1] https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/2819582?hl=en https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/2819582?hl=en
- rashkov 10y ago
  I think the assumption is that any sufficiently motivated attacker will find a way to compromise their target. What e2e encryption accomplishes is the end of dragnet surveillance of entire societies, something that Snowden has exposed in great detail already.
  - xg15 10y ago
dimino 10y ago
> that has garnered praise by everyone from Snowden to filmmaker Laura Poitras The idiom "everyone from X to Y" is supposed to demonstrate breadth of support, where X and Y are very different sources, but Snowden and Poitras are most certainly extremely similar sources.
detaro 10y ago
slightly OT: has anybody made a bot or alternative client for Signal (even basic functionality)? I'd love to see a code example and was surprised that I couldn't find anything.

174 points by pje 10y ago

Moxie's been a huge inspiration for me in tech, i first discovered him through his blog post Career Advice: https://moxie.org/blog/career-advice/ https://moxie.org/blog/career-advice/

nurmara 10y ago
I've read this blog post multiple times over the past few months and I wish I knew about it before I went to college. His career advice has so much clarity that I can't find elsewhere (so far). Thanks for sharing the link. I'm about to do a career switch and reading this again is certainly reassuring. He is right. We are what we do for a living. I find his work very inspirational and I hope I'll be able to personally thank him one day for all the work he has done.
- domusliber 10y ago
  If you don't mind me asking, what career are you switching from and to? I'm about to graduate but I'm not looking forward to any of my default career options. I'd be curious to hear about your experience and plans.
  - nurmara 10y ago
    I'm about to graduate from medical school in a few months. Once I get my medical degree, I'm going for an undergraduate degree in Computer Science. I've always wanted to do computer science since high school but I equally wanted to become a doctor. At one point I decided being a doctor was more important. I valued autonomy highly and I figured nothing is better than the freedom to operate my own small private practice in the future. I didn't want to end up being employed as a programmer and I expected that being a freelancer is no where near as stable in terms of job prospects as being a doctor, especially on the long run. Add to that the fact that I was fascinated by how the human body works for the same reasons I was fascinated with computers. I think any hacker-minded person would. I wanted to know the ins and outs of the human body. I wanted to know how it breaks, and how to fix it. Also, to be honest, I was very tempted with the extra income that comes with medical practice, but autonomy was ultimately the primary motive. 6 Years later, here I am, graduating with a decent GPA but having 0% interest in pursuing clinical practice, although i have performed very well clinically and in terms of my medical knowledge. I simply realized that the practice of medicine (specifically diagnostics and treatment decisions) is nothing but a classification problem. We are literally trained to memorize 'algorithms' (flow charts) for diagnosing and managing hundreds of different illnesses. That's about it really. It boils down to asking a standard set of questions (the patient's history), examining the patient, and trying to guess the diagnosis. Often, lab tests are needed (you order them based on the flow chart you memorized for the presenting symptoms). Once they're available, the diagnosis is usually clear, or further testing and imaging is required, and the cycle continues. Even for the complicated medical issues, this whole process can be represented by a simple flowchart that easily fits on an A4 sheet). The majority of modern day work done by doctors can (and will) be automated in the near future. The biggest hurdle was never the technology; it's the laws and regulations. I've seen papers published in the 80s where AI bested human doctors in diagnosing many diseases, and recently I've seen more impressive results in radiology and pathology diagnostics, where the diagnosis purely depends on vision, which is a very complicated problem when you try to solve it with computers. The results are very promising and some papers have shown results where human pathologists and radiologists were outperformed by computer vision. Humans are obviously still needed to deal with patients. It takes some clinical skill to know how to extract information from patients, how to examine them, and how to look for clues, but that does not strictly require a doctor to be done properly. In fact, most of our medical training, even in residency, is concerned with learning more and more 'algorithms', guidelines, and staying up to date with the latest medical evidence. Computers won't replace doctors in surgical specialties, but they certainly will replace primary care physicians, as well as doctors in other fields like internal medicine (including its subspecialties like cardiology, Pulmonology, etc), emergency medicine, oncology, and others. These fields purely depend on memorizing and recalling flow charts of diagnosis and management. Humans are fallible when it comes to memory and recall, computers are much much less fallible in these cases, and virtually infallible in some cases (100% diagnostic sensitivity and specificity was reported in some studies, which is impossible to achieve by humans) By the time I realized what I mentioned above, I was already close to finishing med school. I decided to graduate first then see what I wanted to do next. I no longer saw any inherent joy or value in being a doctor. There is no room for trying to be creative, smart, or efficient. You just have to follow the official guidelines and policies, and hope you don't get sued when you, inevitably, make a mistake. I see no meaning in a career like that. I love coding and I love learning CS in my free time so my decision for what to do next was easy. There are some interesting studies utilizing AI for diagnosing cancer metastasis on CT scans using computer vision, and that's an example of a topic I might be interested in. I don't necessarily want to do medically related research all the time though. All I want to do is to be a software engineer working on very interesting projects. Even the most mundane coding projects are easily 10x more mentally stimulating than clinical work in my opinion. In retrospect, I have no regrets. I know a lot about how my body works and I leanred a lot from dealing with hundreds of patients over the years. I also learned a lot about who I am and what I really want, and to me, this knowledge is invaluable. I also realized how much I appreciated computer science. I guess that's enough rambling. Apologies for the late and long reply. I hope you found it useful, and I wish you the best of luck in your future career ;)
    - pfg 10y ago
      This was very interesting and insightful to read, thanks!
      - nurmara 10y ago
        You're welcome :)

ex3ndr 10y ago

Not for everyone, their crypto is GPL only and GPL can't be deployed everywhere.

wtbob 10y ago
> Not for everyone, their crypto is GPL only and GPL can't be deployed everywhere. GPL code can be used anywhere; GPL code cannot be made proprietary.
- sandebert 10y ago
  Well, no. You could have a situation where there's a policy in place forbidding installing GPL-licensed products. (I don't have any info about it, but I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case at Microsoft a while ago.) EDIT: I'm getting downvotes and don't understand why. I'm seriously interested, can someone explain the reason?
  - a3_nm 10y ago
    That's the fault of the people making that policy, not the fault of the people licensing the code under GPL.
    - andrewflnr 10y ago
      Pointing the finger somewhere different doesn't change the practical reality. The only question there is how likely a GPL ban is to actually affect you (seems small to me, to be honest, but I don't know).
      - belorn 10y ago
        If we are talking about probability, I have heard more times that a developer is working in a place which forbids all non-approved software from being installed and used on work computers. One web developer could not even install an alternate web browser to test the code that they wrote. Anything that is not a code snippet that is considered so small as to not be copyrightable was banned. Of course, their market wasn't very competitive and thus they could have such policy without much risk. In more competitive areas like games, companies like blizzard has shown to use any license that is compatible with their business model, and in some cases, directly asked developer for exceptions. In that kind of market, a ideology based policy doesn't work and would only give ground to the competition.

circuit_breaker 10y ago

Watch his documentary "Hold Fast" to get a glimpse of just how unique and interesting a character he is. Anarchists yachting? Yes, more, please

youngbullind 10y ago
Such a good film.
goldenkey 10y ago
Thanks, definitely was worth watching. What an awesome crew.
spurgu 10y ago
Whoa. I've watched that documentary a few times before but never realized it's Moxie.
j_s 10y ago
https://vimeo.com/15351476 https://vimeo.com/15351476
pureIDEOLOGY 10y ago
If that's his autobiographical documentary, I'll pass. Never seen a more narcissistic piece of trash in my life. He won't stop talking in his monotonous voice the whole time--made it to the first scene where he films a conversation, but had to cut it off because even that he had to overdub--guy loooooves the sound of his own voice.

vechernyaya 10y ago

Oh the irony of an article about encryption on a site sans encryption.

dbalan 10y ago
Its incredibly hard for publishers to do https, where main revenue is from serving third party content embedded inside. Wired has nice article about their efforts going https https://www.wired.com/2016/04/wired-launching-https-security-upgrade/ https://www.wired.com/2016/04/wired-launching-https-security...
- vechernyaya 10y ago
  Nice article. Thanks, dbalan!
ScottBurson 10y ago
Huh? I'm connecting over HTTPS right now. Have you tried it?
- BGZq7 10y ago
  When I try, I get a certificate that expired 5 months ago. www.popsci.com uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate expired on 12/10/2015 05:59 PM. The current time is 05/11/2016 01:39 AM. Error code: SEC_ERROR_EXPIRED_CERTIFICATE
- vechernyaya 10y ago
  I don't get HTTPS :( http://i.imgur.com/TByP8XM.png?1 http://i.imgur.com/TByP8XM.png?1 dbalan's explanation is quite legit. Hope they get there.
- tombrossman 10y ago
  How are you connecting to the site? Genuinely curious as it definitely does not support HTTPS which the sibling comments confirm. Are you on a work computer with proxied MITM certificates, maybe some badly-configured security software (like Superfish), or something else? It would be good to know why this is happening.

blablablaat 10y ago

Not for people who don't want Google on their device. He only wants distribution via Google, and even went as far to demand that free/libre Play-alternative F-droid removed their build of TextSecure. See: https://fdroid.eutopia.cz/ https://fdroid.eutopia.cz/

AtticHacker 10y ago
Huge deal breaker for me, regrettably.
- lisper 10y ago
  You might want to try this then: https://github.com/Spark-Innovations/SC4 https://github.com/Spark-Innovations/SC4
- feklar 10y ago
  Experiment with a reversed play services framework http://forum.xda-developers.com/android/apps-games/app-microg-gmscore-floss-play-services-t3217616 http://forum.xda-developers.com/android/apps-games/app-micro...
  - AtticHacker 10y ago
    I'm not familiar with this but it looks like an interesting project. My problem however is that I mainly do not like that GPL'd software isn't allowed to be redistributed. I might not be properly informed on this issue (and please correct me if I'm wrong) but from what I've read that seems to be the case.
    - simoncion 10y ago
      > I might not be properly informed on this issue. You're not. Here's an okay starting point into the discussion: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/issues/282 https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/issues/282 Another thing to remember is that (IIRC) -for approximately forever- Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been a Linux distro that's composed almost entirely of Open Source software, but prohibits folks who receive the binaries from redistributing them.

ashitlerferad 10y ago

Moxie makes encryption for the majority of people, not for everyone.

aavotins 10y ago

With people like Moxie the future doesn't look that bleak anymore. The guy is really dedicated to what he is doing and, quite honestly, it is pleasing to see someone in the tech community who is not egocentric around creating his online persona. I'm not trying to insult anyone, just expressing gratitude that there's people who care about code, not striving to become rock stars.

abalone 10y ago

I've respected Moxie Marlinspike ever since he made sslstrip, a simple illustration of the fundamental insecurity of browser-based HTTPS. However I do question his premise that criminals already have the wherewithal to opt in to "clunky" strong encryption before engaging in criminal activity. In fact there are many scenarios where criminals simply go with the default security configuration in consumer devices, either because they (a) did not plan the crime in advance or (b) aren't as smart about opsec as you might expect. There are many good arguments to make strong encryption the default for consumer devices, but here I feel he was attempting to take an easy way out by pretending it's orthogonal to investigating crimes. In fact it is a tradeoff, granting us security from cybercriminals and bad state actors (if there's even a difference), while making it harder for law enforcement in some scenarios.

EdHominem 10y ago
Right, not all criminals can choose secure defaults. But those who can't are unlikely to be all that secure in other ways either meaning that it won't change the threat landscape much. Besides, it wouldn't kill our LEOs to work for their supper. This reliance on dragnet tactics means that'll soon be all they're able to do.
cJ0th 10y ago
or (c) they don't have to care about it. "security by obscurity" might proves as being good enough. I could write you a text message: "Hey abalone, do you fancy helping me planting a tree over at my garden?" and it seems perfectly innocent until you consider that planting a tree could be a code for all sort of things. As long as you don't "plant trees" every week and talk about all kind of things in your text messages you are not attracting attention. One could argue that truly innocent/law abiding people require strong encryption the most because of all the criminals out there.

brianzelip 10y ago

Three cheers for Moxie!

xg15 10y ago

To be honest, I don't understand what substantial benefit end-to-end encryption actually brings in an environment of (almost-)mandatory updates. - If someone from Facebook/Telegram/Signal/etc wants to know what you're writing, they can just instruct their app (via update) to send them your key. For closed-source services, you'd theoretically have to decompile and audit each update to make sure they are not doing that. - If they want to know what you have written in the past, they can instruct the app to send them the conversation log. - If Google (or Apple or Microsoft, respectively) want to know what you're writing, they can instruct the OS to send them the data. (Google's "Android Backup Service" for example also backs up "third party settings and data" [1]. I don't know about the details of the backup service, but this shows to me it's quite possible that your key or conversation logs might even land accidentally on some providers' servers without them having any bad intent.) - If (three letter agency of your choice) wants to get the data, they can just force any of the above companies via NSLs to get it for them. - If any of the US strategic partners want to get the data, they can likely make a deal with an intelligence agency. - Lastly, if the messenger company wants to mine or sell user data, they still have a lot of stuff that cannot be encrypted for operational reasons (such as your contact list and the phone numbers of all your contacts). That leaves to me the only group for which "overlay encryption" brings an actual benefit political activists in a country not at all affiliated with the US - or highly knowledgeable individuals who carefully control which updates they get. Both groups are important to consider but likely had ways to protect their communication before. To actually protect communication not just from "the government" but also from the private industry, we would at least need some independent party to vet app updates. [1] https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/2819582?hl=en https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/2819582?hl=en

rashkov 10y ago
I think the assumption is that any sufficiently motivated attacker will find a way to compromise their target. What e2e encryption accomplishes is the end of dragnet surveillance of entire societies, something that Snowden has exposed in great detail already.
- xg15 10y ago

dimino 10y ago

> that has garnered praise by everyone from Snowden to filmmaker Laura Poitras The idiom "everyone from X to Y" is supposed to demonstrate breadth of support, where X and Y are very different sources, but Snowden and Poitras are most certainly extremely similar sources.

detaro 10y ago

slightly OT: has anybody made a bot or alternative client for Signal (even basic functionality)? I'd love to see a code example and was surprised that I couldn't find anything.