281–290 of 671 posts
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It seems like the most secure way to send a message these days might be snail mail. While I know the feds to open it from time to time in specific cases, they definitely don't open all.
no, they don't open the mail, but they scan all the addresses as part of their routing process. We should assume that all postal "metadata" is stored forever.
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This would imply that the court can order you to lie to your customers. I think this is not the case. If there is any precedence for any US court requiring public citizen to lie I definitely want to know about it. If the courts are acting like they have this power then it will greatly change my perception of how the courts, NSA, and congress are currently acting.
They have in the past - there are definitely situations where you are required to lie, for example, when working on classified materials or covert operations.
So.... what should we use now?
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> Kudos for standing up for his users, Where did you get this one from? I think its a bit of a stretch to say he is "standing up to his users". I would rather say he is standing up against the GOV, and that's nice for a change, but we have no idea what has happened with all the emails residing on their servers. Knowing just a bit that I know how the us gov operates, I am pretty sure he was given two options at exact…
Hello, I didn't say stand up to, but for (i.e. on behalf of) . The most he can do is stand up to the government, for his users, in court, deleting servers would not be a wise move, and I wouldn't expect it of him, would you? Just standing up and saying no in a climate like this takes some courage, for which I admire him.
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Well there we go then, Constitutional Fourth Amendment protections restored. But why do I get the impression that's not actually what we all were really asking for here?
Google, Yahoo, MS, etc don't encrypt their data and they had the same choice to make when served with a NSL or whatever. They fought through legal channels to some degree before caving. Shutting down operations was technically possible, though infeasible. They could have spoken out publicly and accepted the consequences. I doubt they think twice about handing over data requested in a warrant nor should they.
I think most people expect that the Fourth Amendment would have applied to email hosted at these places, but that's because they don't understand how the case law has been applied to things like this.
If people really just want cloud-based email they can check from multiple devices, that does have "normal court protections", and without having to host on their own PC this kind of thing is a possible solution. There are existing turnkey software frameworks to make it work too (e.g., Kolab, which is developed by some of my fellow devs in Europe).
If Congress has passed laws abridging the freedom of speech, then those laws are illegitimate. Unfortunately, it feels as if speaking favorably of the Constitution is enough to get put on a watch list anymore.
For that matter, Congress can legally restrict speech in certain national security issues, and has, again, done so for a very long time. The Supreme Court has (in my opinion, correctly) understood that restricting people handling classified documentation from repeating that information is, without extraordinary circumstances (more on that in a second), completely legal, for example.
The trick here is the sheer breadth of the NSLs. I completely agree that they're unconstitutional, and I sincerely hope they are struck down in court. But I hope that I've just highlighted why this isn't a slam-dunk situation for those on the receiving end of an NSL. Add in that, at least so far, any disputes with NSLs have to be taken up with the FISA court, and even wins against NSLs don't actually count as binding precedent, because FISA itself does not create binding precedent.
Congress can, in certain circumstances, make laws restricting freedom of speech. This isn't one of those instances. But suing our way to that conclusion will take time, money, and personal risk for the petitioner.
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The difficulty is that most recipients of your message will not be willing to use whatever crypto technology you've chosen. PGP is probably the most popular email encryption system, but good luck finding people who use it. I work in the software industry, and I don't regularly correspond with a single person whom I know to use PGP.
It'll be interesting to see whether companies start to shift to using encrypted email over the next few decades - it's not that hard to set up if you know the counterparty will be using encryption of the same kind, and if it's not a service bought in from an external company you can fairly sure it is secure. Companies could at least insist that intra-company email is encrypted, which would be a huge amount of their n…
The core problem with widespread crypto use today is not encryption, it's trusted key exchange.