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Judges Poised to Hand U.S. Spies the Keys to the Internet
- higherpurpose 13y agoIf this happens, I hope more US companies or start-ups move their headquarters/servers abroad. Maybe then Congress will do something serious about it. This, perhaps more than anything revealed so far, would make me switch to a non-US based service as soon as possible.
- talmand 13y agoThat wouldn't be enough, they would also have to stop all their economic activity within the US for Congress to notice or care.
- roywiggins 13y agoThe NSA can just crack into your servers abroad, if they want to; no warrants required. Admittedly they'd have to work a bit harder if it's not in a jurisdiction friendly to them, but breaking into foreign servers is basically their job. If people running the company in question still hold US citizenship or keep money in the US, the US legal system can still reach them unless they never want to go home.
- polymatter 13y agoand its not exactly trivial to renounce US citizenship either. They'll still come after you if they believe you're just tax dodging.
- GVIrish 13y agoYes if companies move off shore then the NSA doesn't even have to give a second thought to the legality of their actions(not that they're giving it much thought now). But if enough big US businesses move elsewhere and take their jobs and tax revenue with them, that will probably serve as a strong motivator for Congress critters.
- alexeisadeski3 13y agoI wish! Reality is far from that I am afraid.
- winslow 13y agoMaybe google is planning this with their secret barge buildings? Float them offshore and become sovereign on their own? This way they wouldn't have to comply with government requests to turn over data and use the possibility to evade taxes as well? Seems a little far fetched but you never know.
- wavefunction 13y agoIt was incredibly far-fetched until you mentioned dodging taxes... That is apparently the only government action that will stir these tech behemoths to action.
- winslow 13y agoI agree, evade taxes and maybe user data not getting into the hands of NSA/US Gov't via court request would be a byproduct. Obviously the NSA would just try exploiting their floating data centers.
- EGreg 13y agoWhy can't SSL be used to secure a symmetric key exchange that clients then save on their own computers or USB dongles? Of course, privacy obsessed clients can simply run their own email client off a USB stick with their own private keys. But anyway, if the servers simply store keys which the clients themselves unlock via their passwords, and the server stores nothing, the NSA would have to either sabotage the hardware the clients use or else do rubberhose cryptanalysis.
- viraptor 13y agoThat's pretty much how it works, but without persisting the symmetric key for too long. Asymmetric crypto is expensive, so first the symmetric crypto key is exchanged and then only that is used for data transfer. </simplification, sorry if too much>
- leeoniya 13y agothe only solution is if the client (open source so it cannot be compromised) did all the encryption and decryption. that way you can store your keys and the server can store your encrypted data. otherwise you trust a compromisable third party to authenticate the server as legit.
- dllthomas 13y ago"(open source so it cannot be compromised)" Open source is necessary (or nearly so) but not sufficient.
- EGreg 13y agoWhy is it necessary?
- dredmorbius 13y agoUnless you provide sources, and, really, a viable build environment -- see RMS's discussions on this, and such counterexamples as Red Hat's rather difficult-to-reverse-engineer build environment (the real value-added of CentOS and other RHEL free forks), as well as Microsoft's long-standing source licenses to academics (build environment not included AFAIR) -- it's possible to hide either failures or backdoors in your products. True crypto is well-tested crypto. That doesn't mean "verified" (can't prove a negative), but it does mean very thoroughly vetted. Even proprietary security companies have long practiced source provided (different from "open source") code for their key crypto engines. PGP comes to mind in this regard (the company, not the protocol). But fully open source means you've got vastly more exposure of your crypto guts to examination.
- mikevm 13y agoBy the way, Ladar, Phil Zimmermann and others are working on a new secure end-to-end Email protocol: http://darkmail.info/ http://darkmail.info/ There's also some information on the Kickstarter page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ladar/lavabits-dark-mail-initiative https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ladar/lavabits-dark-mai...
- RMacy 13y agoWow, that judge would not stop interrupting the lawyer. Is that typical?
- lagugun 13y agoYes, and lawyers go into these hearings anticipating being interrupted with questions.
- ItendToDisagree 13y agoIt sounded less like being interrupted with questions, more so with accusations that what the lawyer intended to argue was unrealistic, because the agency (that has been shown to work outside of the bounds of their intended mission spying on personal interests/lying to congress/etc) would only do what was morally right, and within the intended (but unwritten) letter of the law. But you are right in that he probably should have been prepared for this as well. Its not unthinkable that judges would be adversarial to this sort of defense/line of thinking.
- CWuestefeld 13y agoIt seems that judges can be jerks sometimes. I was once a witness to a traffic accident, and had to go to court. The judge asked the defendant (whose inattention caused the accident) what happened, and his story wound up "and so the other guy was shaken up but not injured". The judge then gave a several minute harangue over his presumption in knowing what happened to the other guy. Finally he asks the guy "how do you KNOW that he wasn't injured?". The guy replies, "I went to see him to apologize, and he TOLD ME that he wasn't injured." Of course, the "told me" what second-hand so probably not admissible, but it sure didn't warrant the rant that the judge gave him.
- ItendToDisagree 13y agoAnecdotal, but every Judge I've met (outside of their working environment) was a pretty self-important asshole, and I've met a number... Not always the case I'm sure but it has always made me rethink the idea of a Judge as an 'impartial' adjucator
- negativity 13y agoI expect the militarization of space to follow the same approximate trajectory as all this internet skulduggery.
- sneak 13y agoThe real questions: a) Why does Wired, a tech pub who should know better, seem entirely ignorant of the existence of PFS cipher suites? b) Why wasn't Lavabit using PFS? Then key compromise is mostly irrelevant as long as you're not incarcerated and can scream bloody murder.
- wmeredith 13y agoWired is pretty bad when it comes to actual journalism. I've noted this elsewhere on HN in the past (and have seen others echo my sentiments) but any time I read one of their stories covering a field where i have a lot of knowledge, they always get basic concepts as well as things like simple domain vernacular wrong. I can only assume this also applies to areas where I have little expertise. The more knowledgeable about tech I become, the more I view Wired as a tabloid/click bait farm.
- canvia 13y agoThey have many different contributing writers. Some are better than others. Same goes for the NYT or any other large journalistic organization.
- rsingel 13y agoReally, Kevin Poulsen is the Wired writer you are going to pick on? He co-created Secure Drop with Aaron Swartz. If your memory doesn't go back that far, there was that cool article the other day about how a hacker reverse-engineered OKCupid. He's written stories that have put pedophiles in jail and exposed the FBI's use of malware on criminal suspects. Someone else can defend Wired in toto these days, but, I will say it'd be hard to choose a less appropriate writer as proof for your first sentence. And, yes, Poulsen was my former boss and editor.
- BlackDeath3 13y agoInterestingly, the post to which you're replying never actually refers to Kevin Poulsen, neither explicitly nor (as far as I'm concerned) implicitly.
- zmanian 13y agoWe need to assume a threat model today where Advanced Persistent Threats can seize private keys from hosting providers and US companies. Both secret court orders and hypervizor exploits are part of this threat profile. This threat is greater from smaller companies. Large companies will be better able to resist secret court orders.
- sedev 13y agoI'm not sure that the current track record supports "Large companies will be better able to resist secret court orders." They have more resources that they could use for that, but they also have more to lose. I don't think we've seen evidence that they are resisting those orders - and certainly have seen evidence that, for example, Verizon and AT&T are just handing eavesdroppers everything they want and then some.
- zmanian 13y agoBased on the conversations, I've had with various internet companies lawyers. They consider their private keys to be their crown jewels and they believe the US government would be not be able to keep it secret in the long run if they turned them over.
- Spooky23 13y agoHow do you secure the keys? Smartcards?
- fiatmoney 13y agoYou can buy write-once, use-only SSL modules. Look for "SSL Offload".
- okasaki 13y agoWouldn't it be easier to just gain access to the datacenters where the data is stored, presumably unencrypted?
- acqq 13y agoImagine that the old mails aren't stored anymore on the servers in the data centers, but that you have all the encrypted traffic saved and you can unlock and read all the old mails. The same keys unlock the old mails and all the mails that are going to be made. Why wouldn't you want such keys?
- orthecreedence 13y agoYay for client-side crypto. I think aside from making it hard(er) to steal CC#s and making online banking a bit safer, SSL is fairly useless and has been for a while. I think a new crop of services that generate keys completely on the client and use servers as dumb, data-ignorant conduits between clients are going to be a lot more pervasive in the next 10 years. At least, that's what I'm betting on =].
- iterable 13y agowe are f*d
- ballard 13y agoThe meta goal is getting rid of these judges that don't take privacy seriously.
- xcyu 13y ago"Levison turned over the keys as a nearly illegible computer printout in 4-point type. In early August, Hilton – who once served on the top-secret FISA court – ordered Levison again to provide them in the industry-standard electronic format, and began fining him $5,000 a day for noncompliance. After two days, Levison complied, but then immediately shuttered Lavabit altogether. Levison is appealing the contempt order." Nice.
- fredgrott 13y agoIt seems to me that the number of computer programmers in the world contrasted against the number of judges and politicians who still do not get privacy, security, and technology provides the perfect mix for WWIII via not armed combat but by attacks against spying powers, no matter which country it might be.