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They should do this anyways. It's well known to the technical elite that dragnet surveillance is going on— but it's not known to the general public. It's arguably immoral that the site doesn't switch to https by default and give the public the privacy they think they already have.
The UK isn't the only trusted western country apparently synchronising internet data mining capability. Australia is seriously considering a two year retention of web traffic by ISP's. http://www.itnews.com.au/News/313178,public-opposes-federal-...
They should do this anyways. It's well known to the technical elite that dragnet surveillance is going on— but it's not known to the general public. It's arguably immoral that the site doesn't switch to https by default and give the public the privacy they think they already have.
I used HTTPS Everywhere and HTTPS Finder extensions. That forces your browser to use HTTPS on every server that supports it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What makes you think that those with the resources to implement dragnet surveillance do not have access to properly signed certificates, which let them Man-In-The-Middle the connection without triggering a browser warning?
As you say, some of the parties engaging in the drags absolutely do have the capability. But not all and stopping them has value. More importantly: A man in the middle attack is _highly_ detectable and will leave irrefutable evidence when detected. So it can only be used secretly if it's used very sparingly. And highly overt interception, if its even tolerated by the public, at least solves the problem of people havi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As you say, some of the parties engaging in the drags absolutely do have the capability. But not all and stopping them has value. More importantly: A man in the middle attack is _highly_ detectable and will leave irrefutable evidence when detected. So it can only be used secretly if it's used very sparingly. And highly overt interception, if its even tolerated by the public, at least solves the problem of people havi…
The cost of decryption is practically 0, though. Certainly not a relevant budgetary factor.
To do dragnet surveillance you need an optical tap, an expensive phy, and a fairly modest number of gates to apply a stateless filter purely from onchip memory to capture 100% of interesting flows and grab some small fraction of all other traffic, and some modest switch fabric to carry captured data to a modest amount of storage and processing to deal with it. Programmed correctly commodity network processors for switches have all the right logic already, we're talking in the Adding a MITM attack on top of the model used for dragnet surveillance currently, which involves intercepting 100% of the potentially interesting traffic at all times, performing a costly public key operation per every single connection, and then reencrypting the results is insanely expensive by comparison. Before you even get killed by the crypto costs you've long since run out of memory bandwidth.
Anybody have a guess of what it would cost for Wikipedia to do 100% SSL for a country like Great Britain?
Very little, they already have https support - I am sure that they could handle disabling http . that is not the point. I see the point Jimmy Wales was making - it's the old: 'if you have nothing to hide' - and it should stand. If you want to keep something private you have the right to do that....I don't care what I do in public....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What makes you think that those with the resources to implement dragnet surveillance do not have access to properly signed certificates, which let them Man-In-The-Middle the connection without triggering a browser warning?
To expand on what aidenn0 said: It's possible to do client-side known-public-key verification, which would detect a MITM attack. The idea is basically maintaining a local trusted cert list (other than the broad ones in the OS), but using known site public keys instead of root signing certificates (which I will admit are a security nightmare for SSL). Chrome does this for Google-controlled domains; they call it "publi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cost of decryption is practically 0, though. Certainly not a relevant budgetary factor.
It really isn't. It's only "zero" because you're greatly overestimating the cost of intercepting the traffic at all. To do dragnet surveillance you need an optical tap, an expensive phy, and a fairly modest number of gates to apply a stateless filter purely from onchip memory to capture 100% of interesting flows and grab some small fraction of all other traffic, and some modest switch fabric to carry captured data to…
But seriously, what he's suggesting is the truth. Any website that thinks it might be seen as slightly toxic for its users will move to SSL if it wants to stay in use.
The problem with this play is that turning on SSL for all Wikipedia users would be really very expensive. Encryption costs a lot of CPU cycles and entropy.