I just noticed their HTTPS termination point is hosted on Amazon EC2, so the only thing required for extracting the private key or logging the data is a contact

I just noticed their HTTPS termination point is hosted on Amazon EC2, so the only thing required for extracting the private key or logging the data is a contact at Amazon. No reason to involve DuckDuckGo at all. Since Amazon EC2 hosts are virtual machines, you can just read the machine's RAM and disk from the physical machine it's running on. eta: I don't believe Amazon would agree to do that, or that there is a law allowing anyone to require them to do that.