> If you acknowledge that it's sufficient to prevent evidence recovery Any snake oil is sufficient to thwart some attacker somewhere some of the time. Browser

> If you acknowledge that it's sufficient to prevent evidence recovery Any snake oil is sufficient to thwart some attacker somewhere some of the time. Browser Script Crypto adds a lot of complexity. It also adds a metric crapton of insidious counter-intuitiveness to the security model. These are real and serious engineering drawbacks to BSC. In order for BSC is worthwhile in a given situation, you need to show that any benefits it may bring outweigh the drawbacks and do so better than other solutions. This is never the case in practice, because BSC is vulnerable to all the same attacks as the web browser. > There was a Google "Site Reliability Engineer" who got fired for snooping on young girls chats and harassing them. Solution: Publicly fire the guy. Don't log the chats. > If Gmail sent down Javascript that did the crypto before they got it, this employee would not have been able to do that. I think you're assuming that based on the belief that this engineer would not have been able and willing to conduct an active attack. What is your evidence for this belief? > I'm not very confident that nobody there will ever passively snoop Snooping is their (Google/Facebook) business model. It's just a question of whether or not their internal authorization process was followed. BSC doesn't solve the problem of the insider threat. It may make it marginally more risky for some insiders some of the time, but there are already an unlimited number of ways to make life more complicated for insiders (legitimate or not). > The [Dropbox] flaw, a software bug that rendered the service's authentication mechanism non-functional, As a rule, if the authentication is broken, the encryption is too. > [La Cie] stating that Dropbox's problems wouldn't be an issue if files were encrypted by the client Only maybe if the user chose a strong password and there was literally no way for users to recover their data if they lost it. I'm not against client-side encryption. I'm a fan of PGP and Truecrypt. > JS crypto, in its broken state, offers some improvement for some real-world scenarios that SSL does not even attempt to address. I can think of one or two such scenarios, but not many. Mr. Dotcom may well be the exception that proves the rule; his primary adversary is the US DOJ. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out.