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> it's not [the government] who designed lavabit such that it was impossible to execute this without obtaining access to every other user. That's true, but the

> it's not [the government] who designed lavabit such that it was impossible to execute this without obtaining access to every other user. That's true, but they're still essentially implying that services which are explicitly designed to omit backdoor capabilities for the government to spy on you -- that is, services offering actual cryptographically guaranteed privacy, not just "no one has looked yet, and if they did, it'll all turn out okay in the end trust us" -- are broadly illegal and will get you criminal contempt.

stonemetal 13y ago
It has always been illegal to not comply with search warrants. Why would search warrants for digital data be any different?
- bigiain 13y ago
  It's also always been legal to say "sorry, we never record any of that information". You can get a warrant asking a bartender to provide you with names, addresses, and arrival and departure times, and transcripts of every conversation of every patron of his bar, and he can stand up in court and say "sorry, I don't have that information, and I'm not prepared to start collecting it.". Would you be happy for the FBI to be able to compel a bar owner to start collecting those records for everybody who walks into his bar? Without letting either new patrons or regulars know he was doing so?
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - stonemetal 13y ago
    It's also always been legal to say "sorry, we never record any of that information" Only if it is true. He has the data, the article says he has worked with law enforcement before in a kiddie porn case.
  - lmm 13y ago
    >You can get a warrant asking a bartender to provide you with names, addresses, and arrival and departure times, and transcripts of every conversation of every patron of his bar No, you can't; the courts don't issue warrants like that. They'd issue a warrant for that information for one particular patron whom they already had reasonable suspicion of. If the FBI have a warrant to put a bug on one regular's table, that doesn't seem unreasonable. If the bartender's carefully built the bar so that you can hear every conversation from every table and so the only way you can place a bug is one that would also record everyone else's conversations... yeah, I'd say that's unfortunate (and pretty poor design on the owner's part), but the FBI has the right to place the bug they've got the warrant for, and if there's really no way to do that without it picking up other conversations then too bad.
    - emhs 13y ago
      The nature of email is that the government's methods would simply collect all users' data, regardless of whether it was the target's or not. This would be true regardless of Lavabit being designed with user protection in mind or not, unless specialized methods such as those Levison offered to write were employed. Such methods would necessarily vary from provider to provider, because each provider is set up differently. The government simply defaults to massive collection in all cases so they don't have to write that or pay someone to write it. He offered to give them a means to get only the data they asked for, but they turned that down.
anologwintermut 13y ago
Lavabit had no such guarantees. First, the court order was for meta-data which wasn't encrypted. Second, encryption was done server side, so they did have access to the data the government requested. The judge wasn't talking about end-to-end encryption. They were talking about Lavabit's assertion that it was difficult to get the data they admitted to having.
- fennecfoxen 13y ago
  You say "Lavabit had no such guarantees." Without me arguing one way or another whether that's true -- do you think if they had better guarantees, that anything would be different here? That the government would say "oh no, we'll back down now"?
  - betterunix 13y ago
    Suppose that Lavabit sold smart cards for end-to-end encryption, and as a service would store ciphertexts for you. The government shows up with a warrant, Lavabit says, "Sorry, we cannot comply because we cannot access secret keys or decrypt messages by some other means." What exactly does the government do after that? The point is that Lavabit's architecture did not resist these kinds of demands at all. At best all Lavabit could do is protect your mail until you log in.
    - fennecfoxen 13y ago
      So here's a hypothetical for you. Suppose we build an architecture which you feel is more secure. Then the NSA people say "we have analyzed it, and there's a theoretical information leak. because that information leak exists you have to install our software which will exploit it. but if you'd designed your system better you would have been okay. also, incidentally, you're now legally forbidden from fixing this leak." Then the legal obligations of the architecture are primary determined by the effectiveness of your security architecture; the existence of defects in the architecture which would preserve security in the absence of their exploitation is the thing matters to the court system. That sounds tantamount to what you're proposing; is that really the sort of legal framework you think we have / should have? I personally think it's ridiculous, and I reject your justification and others which rely on a technical deficiency in Lavabit's implementation to endorse the legality and moral authority of the court's orders.
smoyer 13y ago
CALEA requires that all telephone companies (and now mobile phone and cable companies) provide a means of "tapping" a phone line. To my knowledge, there's nothing similar that says a data service has to provide the ability to retrieve unencrypted data.
- SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago
  What they required was more like the means to tap all the phone lines simultaneously.
  - lymie 13y ago
    This is why phone companies are allowed to be a monopoly. No mom and pop shop would allow it.
- ipsin 13y ago
  See Section 216 of the Patriot Act, which throws in the ability to get "pen register" information (metadata) from Internet communications. http://www.justice.gov/archive/ll/subs/add_myths.htm#s216 http://www.justice.gov/archive/ll/subs/add_myths.htm#s216 Yet another reason to repeal the "Patriot" Act.
  - gaadd33 13y ago
    Wouldn't metadata in this case be like "Ip X connected at Y and transferred Z bytes"? Similar to what a pen register produces with a phone call.

stonemetal 13y ago

It has always been illegal to not comply with search warrants. Why would search warrants for digital data be any different?

bigiain 13y ago
It's also always been legal to say "sorry, we never record any of that information". You can get a warrant asking a bartender to provide you with names, addresses, and arrival and departure times, and transcripts of every conversation of every patron of his bar, and he can stand up in court and say "sorry, I don't have that information, and I'm not prepared to start collecting it.". Would you be happy for the FBI to be able to compel a bar owner to start collecting those records for everybody who walks into his bar? Without letting either new patrons or regulars know he was doing so?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- stonemetal 13y ago
  It's also always been legal to say "sorry, we never record any of that information" Only if it is true. He has the data, the article says he has worked with law enforcement before in a kiddie porn case.
- lmm 13y ago
  >You can get a warrant asking a bartender to provide you with names, addresses, and arrival and departure times, and transcripts of every conversation of every patron of his bar No, you can't; the courts don't issue warrants like that. They'd issue a warrant for that information for one particular patron whom they already had reasonable suspicion of. If the FBI have a warrant to put a bug on one regular's table, that doesn't seem unreasonable. If the bartender's carefully built the bar so that you can hear every conversation from every table and so the only way you can place a bug is one that would also record everyone else's conversations... yeah, I'd say that's unfortunate (and pretty poor design on the owner's part), but the FBI has the right to place the bug they've got the warrant for, and if there's really no way to do that without it picking up other conversations then too bad.
  - emhs 13y ago
    The nature of email is that the government's methods would simply collect all users' data, regardless of whether it was the target's or not. This would be true regardless of Lavabit being designed with user protection in mind or not, unless specialized methods such as those Levison offered to write were employed. Such methods would necessarily vary from provider to provider, because each provider is set up differently. The government simply defaults to massive collection in all cases so they don't have to write that or pay someone to write it. He offered to give them a means to get only the data they asked for, but they turned that down.

anologwintermut 13y ago

Lavabit had no such guarantees. First, the court order was for meta-data which wasn't encrypted. Second, encryption was done server side, so they did have access to the data the government requested. The judge wasn't talking about end-to-end encryption. They were talking about Lavabit's assertion that it was difficult to get the data they admitted to having.

fennecfoxen 13y ago
You say "Lavabit had no such guarantees." Without me arguing one way or another whether that's true -- do you think if they had better guarantees, that anything would be different here? That the government would say "oh no, we'll back down now"?
- betterunix 13y ago
  Suppose that Lavabit sold smart cards for end-to-end encryption, and as a service would store ciphertexts for you. The government shows up with a warrant, Lavabit says, "Sorry, we cannot comply because we cannot access secret keys or decrypt messages by some other means." What exactly does the government do after that? The point is that Lavabit's architecture did not resist these kinds of demands at all. At best all Lavabit could do is protect your mail until you log in.
  - fennecfoxen 13y ago
    So here's a hypothetical for you. Suppose we build an architecture which you feel is more secure. Then the NSA people say "we have analyzed it, and there's a theoretical information leak. because that information leak exists you have to install our software which will exploit it. but if you'd designed your system better you would have been okay. also, incidentally, you're now legally forbidden from fixing this leak." Then the legal obligations of the architecture are primary determined by the effectiveness of your security architecture; the existence of defects in the architecture which would preserve security in the absence of their exploitation is the thing matters to the court system. That sounds tantamount to what you're proposing; is that really the sort of legal framework you think we have / should have? I personally think it's ridiculous, and I reject your justification and others which rely on a technical deficiency in Lavabit's implementation to endorse the legality and moral authority of the court's orders.

smoyer 13y ago

CALEA requires that all telephone companies (and now mobile phone and cable companies) provide a means of "tapping" a phone line. To my knowledge, there's nothing similar that says a data service has to provide the ability to retrieve unencrypted data.

SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago
What they required was more like the means to tap all the phone lines simultaneously.
- lymie 13y ago
  This is why phone companies are allowed to be a monopoly. No mom and pop shop would allow it.
ipsin 13y ago
See Section 216 of the Patriot Act, which throws in the ability to get "pen register" information (metadata) from Internet communications. http://www.justice.gov/archive/ll/subs/add_myths.htm#s216 http://www.justice.gov/archive/ll/subs/add_myths.htm#s216 Yet another reason to repeal the "Patriot" Act.
- gaadd33 13y ago
  Wouldn't metadata in this case be like "Ip X connected at Y and transferred Z bytes"? Similar to what a pen register produces with a phone call.