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> Unencrypted is secure It is not. Unencrypted is environmental pollution that need to be actively prevent until it reach zero use. A favorable future is one w

by belorn 7y ago

> Unencrypted is secure It is not. Unencrypted is environmental pollution that need to be actively prevent until it reach zero use. A favorable future is one where the firewall blocks any unencrypted traffic by default. Similar, giving third party clear text copies of private information is not secure. It is never going to be secure, and the only half working solution there is the kind of heavy legal regulations and systems that does not exist anywhere yet. If people want to debate over which end-to-end encryption scheme is best then they can do so as much they want, but in the end the goal here is to stop plain text from continuing harming people.

jcranmer 7y ago
You managed to cut out the key word in the quote: unencrypted is secure enough. Email is protected with TLS on all every hop if your provider is competent. My point is that this protection is sufficient for most purposes. Where it is not sufficient, email encryption doesn't actually add the protection you probably wanted (this is the what the original article is detailing).
- belorn 7y ago
  The optimal provider in those cases is oneself, running the email on an disk encrypted server, using dane, dnssec, and strict dmarc policy to match (should be noted that the author of this article are also against some of those technologies, and if I recall right, also against people running their own email server). Project like freedom box could make email encryption obsolete, but thats not because unencryption would be secure enough. It would be because the encryption would be moved away from the individual email and onto the whole server.
  - joshuamorton 7y ago
    Yes, because the security from using Gmail is higher than what you will get for running your own server. Because Gmail does all of those things, and spends more money and effort making sure they do it correctly than you will over your lifetime. If you have secrets where you believe that, say, a government will extrajudicially lean on Google to access them, theres am equally, or even higher likelihood that you misconfigured something somewhere and leaked your data.
    - belorn 7y ago
      I have a hard time to see any use case where no security is different from giving google a plain text copy of a private conversations where google has the right to determine who and how others might participate in accessing it. Giving google a plain text copy of everything you say in private communication is not good enough security. Anyone working with information that is covered under privacy laws should be held legal responsible for disclosing it to a third party, regardless if that third party is google or a friend at a bar. If it is a doctor, lawyer or government employee the probability of this is close to 100%. If its a company talking to customers, communicating personal data as defined by the EU between employees, there is only a google breach away from being found out and sued. The only choice is encryption, with the choice between a encrypted server under the control of the person responsible for keeping the information safe, or encryption per email. Which of those two choices one choose does not matter but giving google a plain text copy and calling it safe is just LARP security. I should mention that here in Sweden there were recently a large political scandal involving the government using IBM as a third party service provider. Sensitive data got sent over the border and outside the control of the government, and it continued for years as those in charged really wanted to believe that "the cloud" could treated as just as secure as running your own servers. The law said otherwise, and when reality came crashing down things had to change. Convenience does not make it suddenly acceptable to give a third party sensitive information, even if that third party is a large international operator who can't do any wrongs.
      - joshuamorton 7y ago
        Privacy is not security. Privacy laws do not improve your security. PGP does almost nothing to improve your privacy even when used correctly (metadata leaks). I have a hard time understanding what your point is. If Google, or whomever, is following the relevant privacy laws, why do you care if they have a plaintext copy of your private communications?
        belorn 7y ago
        I am talking about the threat model that a person have if they work with information that by law they need to keep secret, which if you live in the EU is basically any personal identifiable information about a customers. There is also a long list of professions that deal with sensitive information and carry legal binding requirements to not divulge to third parties. Typical examples is anyone working in health care, education, government, legal system and so on. I am not talking about meta data but classified or data which if disclosed results in people getting fired and holds legal punishment such as jail time. Using gmail without encryption in those cases is a security issue and also illegal. A lot of people still use gmail in those cases and google track record in regard to data leaks has meant that few people have been found out. That said it will only take one significant data leak and people will start to dig for all data being sent to google. That day a lot of peoples head will roll. I would guess without exaggeration that a large enough data leak at gmail would cause a global market crash. There is just too much plain text data containing sensitive information that people would dig into. Not private, not meta, just information which people should not have given to a third party. Google privacy policy does not play a role in that.

by belorn 7y ago

jcranmer 7y ago

You managed to cut out the key word in the quote: unencrypted is secure enough. Email is protected with TLS on all every hop if your provider is competent. My point is that this protection is sufficient for most purposes. Where it is not sufficient, email encryption doesn't actually add the protection you probably wanted (this is the what the original article is detailing).

belorn 7y ago
The optimal provider in those cases is oneself, running the email on an disk encrypted server, using dane, dnssec, and strict dmarc policy to match (should be noted that the author of this article are also against some of those technologies, and if I recall right, also against people running their own email server). Project like freedom box could make email encryption obsolete, but thats not because unencryption would be secure enough. It would be because the encryption would be moved away from the individual email and onto the whole server.
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  Yes, because the security from using Gmail is higher than what you will get for running your own server. Because Gmail does all of those things, and spends more money and effort making sure they do it correctly than you will over your lifetime. If you have secrets where you believe that, say, a government will extrajudicially lean on Google to access them, theres am equally, or even higher likelihood that you misconfigured something somewhere and leaked your data.
  - belorn 7y ago
    I have a hard time to see any use case where no security is different from giving google a plain text copy of a private conversations where google has the right to determine who and how others might participate in accessing it. Giving google a plain text copy of everything you say in private communication is not good enough security. Anyone working with information that is covered under privacy laws should be held legal responsible for disclosing it to a third party, regardless if that third party is google or a friend at a bar. If it is a doctor, lawyer or government employee the probability of this is close to 100%. If its a company talking to customers, communicating personal data as defined by the EU between employees, there is only a google breach away from being found out and sued. The only choice is encryption, with the choice between a encrypted server under the control of the person responsible for keeping the information safe, or encryption per email. Which of those two choices one choose does not matter but giving google a plain text copy and calling it safe is just LARP security. I should mention that here in Sweden there were recently a large political scandal involving the government using IBM as a third party service provider. Sensitive data got sent over the border and outside the control of the government, and it continued for years as those in charged really wanted to believe that "the cloud" could treated as just as secure as running your own servers. The law said otherwise, and when reality came crashing down things had to change. Convenience does not make it suddenly acceptable to give a third party sensitive information, even if that third party is a large international operator who can't do any wrongs.
    - joshuamorton 7y ago
      Privacy is not security. Privacy laws do not improve your security. PGP does almost nothing to improve your privacy even when used correctly (metadata leaks). I have a hard time understanding what your point is. If Google, or whomever, is following the relevant privacy laws, why do you care if they have a plaintext copy of your private communications?
      - belorn 7y ago
        I am talking about the threat model that a person have if they work with information that by law they need to keep secret, which if you live in the EU is basically any personal identifiable information about a customers. There is also a long list of professions that deal with sensitive information and carry legal binding requirements to not divulge to third parties. Typical examples is anyone working in health care, education, government, legal system and so on. I am not talking about meta data but classified or data which if disclosed results in people getting fired and holds legal punishment such as jail time. Using gmail without encryption in those cases is a security issue and also illegal. A lot of people still use gmail in those cases and google track record in regard to data leaks has meant that few people have been found out. That said it will only take one significant data leak and people will start to dig for all data being sent to google. That day a lot of peoples head will roll. I would guess without exaggeration that a large enough data leak at gmail would cause a global market crash. There is just too much plain text data containing sensitive information that people would dig into. Not private, not meta, just information which people should not have given to a third party. Google privacy policy does not play a role in that.