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Convenient, maybe, but prematurely shutting down secure email because you anticipate the government will come out to get you effectively does the government's j

by scarmig 13y ago

Convenient, maybe, but prematurely shutting down secure email because you anticipate the government will come out to get you effectively does the government's job for it. Albert Hirschman wrote a famous book called "Exit, Voice, Loyalty" about different styles of responses to conflict. Different strategies are certainly called for in different situations. But most exit strategies (outside of suicide) rely on retreats to spaces outside the sphere of influence of the conflict initiator. The existential space of the Internet is not the infinite, however. Although a nurturing environment for human freedom, it's also a fragile ecosystem, and giving up on a couple key nodes, in its current form, is enough to destroy it, shadowy dreams of darknets notwithstanding. When freedom retreats from all Internet spaces in the USA, that is plausibly more than enough to kill it as a haven for freedom anywhere. It's not the end of freedom or anything like that: maybe it's strategic to retreat to spaces more decentralized and harder to compromise than the Internet, and other fights can be fought and won in those. But that's not a gamble I want to make, especially because the fight for Internet freedom hasn't been lost yet! Not by a long shot. ETA: This came off harsher than I anticipated: I had no idea that Silent Circle is a project of Phil Zimmerman. Damn, that's dispiriting. Time to pop open a beer. ETA2: Yeah, I think I jumped to conclusions about their central motivation and shouldn't have implicitly doubted as much their stated reasons. Boo me.

techscruggs 13y ago
"Email that uses standard Internet protocols cannot have the same security guarantees that real-time communications has. There are far too many leaks of information and metadata intrinsically in the email protocols themselves. Email as we know it with SMTP, POP3, and IMAP cannot be secure." I didn't read it as they were prematurely shutting down before the government came after them. I read it as them admitting that they couldn't secure email as much as they would like and are admitting flaws in their encryption strategy.
- revscat 13y ago
  Not their strategy, but the protocols used to handle email. There is simply no way to send emails using standard protocols without leaking information.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
lsb 13y ago
As long as you have Silent Text, you can still have asynchronous textual communication. It's when async text leaves their own apps that things get tricky.
JshWright 13y ago
I'm a Silent Circle employee, but I'm not speaking in any official capacity... The issue with email is that we _had_ to touch plaintext at times. People expect email to work universally, so we had to accept unencrypted mail from outside clients, which we then encrypted for our users. That is a major departure from our other services. It's something we disclosed quite clearly, but we've decided that even with the disclosure, it's simply not worth the risk. We don't even like the idea of storing ciphertext (and obviously, running a mail server means you end up storing a fair amount if it). You can't be compelled to give up what you don't have. This isn't a 'retreat.' Silent Mail was used by a relatively small percentage of our users. Silent Phone and Silent Text are services that we can provide 'responsibly' (in that we don't ever see plaintext, and hold ciphertext in extremely limited situations). They are our core services, and provide our users with the some of tools necessary to communicate securely and privately. We aren't giving up the fight by any means. EDIT: llamataboot summed things up very nicely in another comment thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6183394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6183394
- zurn 13y ago
  This sounds sensible. However isn't the same problem present with "out-circle access" in voice calls? "Silent Phone subscribers can place and receive calls 'outside the circle' from wherever they are in the world, to or from conventional phone numbers*" -https://silentcircle.com/web/out-circle-access/ https://silentcircle.com/web/out-circle-access/
  - JshWright 13y ago
    There are a few key differences though... OCA is a little more 'obvious' in its shortcomings. We still disclose this as clearly and responsibly as we can, but to the average, non-technical user, it seems intuitive that calling a phone that is "outside the circle" is less secure. Our choice for the brand name "Out-Circle" was very intentional. The key difference though is in the data that we have to hold on to. With email, we had to hold on to all sorts of metadata in the email headers (no matter how it's stored, we would obviously have to be able to read it, in order to provide 'email' service). OCA has no such issue. We don't have to log any metadata. Obviously you need to assume that information is being logged _somewhere_ (again, the 'outside' part), but we're not ending up with anything that we could be compelled to hand over. OCA is designed for a different threat model. If you're concerned about the NSA (or the USG (or more broadly the 5 Eyes) in general), then OCA isn't for you. By and large, OCA is for people that need to get their communication securely out of some 'hostile' environment, and aren't especially concerned about western governments (e.g. someone living under an oppressive regime who wants to talk to their ex-pat family in Canada, or a US business man traveling in a country known for stealing trade secrets who needs to talk to his home office about product designs).
mtgx 13y ago
Couldn't this be considered as "chilling speech" - and then sue the government for it?

by scarmig 13y ago

techscruggs 13y ago

"Email that uses standard Internet protocols cannot have the same security guarantees that real-time communications has. There are far too many leaks of information and metadata intrinsically in the email protocols themselves. Email as we know it with SMTP, POP3, and IMAP cannot be secure." I didn't read it as they were prematurely shutting down before the government came after them. I read it as them admitting that they couldn't secure email as much as they would like and are admitting flaws in their encryption strategy.

revscat 13y ago
Not their strategy, but the protocols used to handle email. There is simply no way to send emails using standard protocols without leaking information.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

lsb 13y ago

As long as you have Silent Text, you can still have asynchronous textual communication. It's when async text leaves their own apps that things get tricky.

JshWright 13y ago

I'm a Silent Circle employee, but I'm not speaking in any official capacity... The issue with email is that we _had_ to touch plaintext at times. People expect email to work universally, so we had to accept unencrypted mail from outside clients, which we then encrypted for our users. That is a major departure from our other services. It's something we disclosed quite clearly, but we've decided that even with the disclosure, it's simply not worth the risk. We don't even like the idea of storing ciphertext (and obviously, running a mail server means you end up storing a fair amount if it). You can't be compelled to give up what you don't have. This isn't a 'retreat.' Silent Mail was used by a relatively small percentage of our users. Silent Phone and Silent Text are services that we can provide 'responsibly' (in that we don't ever see plaintext, and hold ciphertext in extremely limited situations). They are our core services, and provide our users with the some of tools necessary to communicate securely and privately. We aren't giving up the fight by any means. EDIT: llamataboot summed things up very nicely in another comment thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6183394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6183394

zurn 13y ago
This sounds sensible. However isn't the same problem present with "out-circle access" in voice calls? "Silent Phone subscribers can place and receive calls 'outside the circle' from wherever they are in the world, to or from conventional phone numbers*" -https://silentcircle.com/web/out-circle-access/ https://silentcircle.com/web/out-circle-access/
- JshWright 13y ago
  There are a few key differences though... OCA is a little more 'obvious' in its shortcomings. We still disclose this as clearly and responsibly as we can, but to the average, non-technical user, it seems intuitive that calling a phone that is "outside the circle" is less secure. Our choice for the brand name "Out-Circle" was very intentional. The key difference though is in the data that we have to hold on to. With email, we had to hold on to all sorts of metadata in the email headers (no matter how it's stored, we would obviously have to be able to read it, in order to provide 'email' service). OCA has no such issue. We don't have to log any metadata. Obviously you need to assume that information is being logged _somewhere_ (again, the 'outside' part), but we're not ending up with anything that we could be compelled to hand over. OCA is designed for a different threat model. If you're concerned about the NSA (or the USG (or more broadly the 5 Eyes) in general), then OCA isn't for you. By and large, OCA is for people that need to get their communication securely out of some 'hostile' environment, and aren't especially concerned about western governments (e.g. someone living under an oppressive regime who wants to talk to their ex-pat family in Canada, or a US business man traveling in a country known for stealing trade secrets who needs to talk to his home office about product designs).

mtgx 13y ago

Couldn't this be considered as "chilling speech" - and then sue the government for it?