At least the Norwegians (and other Scandinavian countries) are publicly open about what they are doing. You'd probably never see this 'news story' in the UK or US except as the solution to some event that supposedly justified it
“100 spies” will monitor all SMS and email that goes in and out of Norway
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Re: “100 spies” will monitor all SMS and email that goes in and out of Norway
#12Sounds like it's only meta-data of emails, not actual content when TLS is used.
When TLS is used there is no metadata either... server x talked to server y for a while, but what, if anything, happened we know not.
Re: “100 spies” will monitor all SMS and email that goes in and out of Norway
#13Re: “100 spies” will monitor all SMS and email that goes in and out of Norway
#14How does that work with encrypted transport? Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and of course many others, all provide IMAP over TLS so sending email to them and receiving from them doesn't go in the clear.
In the majority of cases, TLS for SMTP (delivery between MTAs) is still trivially downgradeable. So they could presumably downgrade and read SMTP traffic that's going between MTAs in Norway and MTAs outside Norway.
Re: “100 spies” will monitor all SMS and email that goes in and out of Norway
#15How does that work with encrypted transport? Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and of course many others, all provide IMAP over TLS so sending email to them and receiving from them doesn't go in the clear.
Even the data is encrypted is worth to save for the future. They will be able to access when they have the key or when some quantum computing breaks it.
Re: “100 spies” will monitor all SMS and email that goes in and out of Norway
#16I doubt most tech literate criminals won't use something like Telegram or Matrix over a tor relay.
Whenever I and my girlfriend talk about anything too personal, I always joke about the government's ability to hear our conversation.
WhatsApp and Viber provide cryptographic communication but, if I'm not mistaken, it needs to be explicitly enabled and I've also read there's a bunch of metadata exposed.
Re: “100 spies” will monitor all SMS and email that goes in and out of Norway
#17How does that work with encrypted transport? Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and of course many others, all provide IMAP over TLS so sending email to them and receiving from them doesn't go in the clear.
My personal belief is that they dont. Best they could achieve is trapping the ISP's sending mail server in Norway before the mail is encrypted but there is no capability to decrypt SSL without obtaining the keys.
They could still store metadata like sending IP address, timestamp etc.
Using foreign webmail via HTTPS would not be intercepted in any possible way. Unless they get support from the service provider in question. I think the service providers you mention will comply with law enforcement and give out your data. But those are isolated cases and mass data required by intelligence services is a different thing. National security letters are only for US Govt use and other governments have no access.
I also think legislation like this is years late now that about every protocol has encrypted variants and they don't get any meaningful results compared to the money spent.
Re: “100 spies” will monitor all SMS and email that goes in and out of Norway
#18I doubt most tech literate criminals won't use something like Telegram or Matrix over a tor relay. Whenever I and my girlfriend talk about anything too personal, I always joke about the government's ability to hear our conversation. WhatsApp and Viber provide cryptographic communication but, if I'm not mistaken, it needs to be explicitly enabled and I've also read there's a bunch of metadata exposed.
You are mistaken about WhatsApp. It does end to end encryption by default. What needs to be explicitly enabled is that theoretically WhatsApp/some bad guy could steal an WhatsApp account, and it would create a new public key, and if you didn't turn on security notifications, you might not be aware that the person you think you are talking to changed. You also should verify that the end to end encryption keys match, but most users are not paranoid to that level.
Re: “100 spies” will monitor all SMS and email that goes in and out of Norway
#19I doubt most tech literate criminals won't use something like Telegram or Matrix over a tor relay. Whenever I and my girlfriend talk about anything too personal, I always joke about the government's ability to hear our conversation. WhatsApp and Viber provide cryptographic communication but, if I'm not mistaken, it needs to be explicitly enabled and I've also read there's a bunch of metadata exposed.
You are mistaken about WhatsApp. It does end to end encryption by default. What needs to be explicitly enabled is that theoretically WhatsApp/some bad guy could steal an WhatsApp account, and it would create a new public key, and if you didn't turn on security notifications, you might not be aware that the person you think you are talking to changed. You also should verify that the end to end encryption keys match, b…
I heard a couple of times, after people get a new phone number, after installing WhatsApp, they see the conversation from the old owner of this phone number. How can this happen then?
Re: “100 spies” will monitor all SMS and email that goes in and out of Norway
#20How does that work with encrypted transport? Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and of course many others, all provide IMAP over TLS so sending email to them and receiving from them doesn't go in the clear.
In the majority of cases, TLS for SMTP (delivery between MTAs) is still trivially downgradeable. So they could presumably downgrade and read SMTP traffic that's going between MTAs in Norway and MTAs outside Norway.
Wouldn't that also be trivially detectable?