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Lavabit abruptly shuts down

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Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#461

Post by rayiner »

enraged_camel wrote: post #449
rayiner wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The democratic solution is to get people to care about your issue. If the anti-abortionists can do it, so can privacy advocates. Also, we have no idea whether Lavabit's operator's real situation is (though I certainly fault the government for the ridiculous NSL scheme that prevents him from spilling the beans). Is he objecting to installing a PRISM-style scheme, or to legitimate wiretaps?

>>The democratic solution is to get people to care about your issue. If the anti-abortionists can do it, so can privacy advocates. Not quite the same thing. Abortion is an inherently sensitive topic that is susceptible to emotion. Saying something as simple as "they are killing helpless babies!" is enough to get a ton of people on the anti-abortion side. What's the equivalent of privacy? How do we make the 4th amendm…

"Obama is going to take away your guns" (by spying on online gun transactions).

"Obama is going to make it illegal to speak out against abortion" (by spying on anti-abortionists).

"Obama is going to make religion illegal" (by spying on your church e-mails).

"Obama is going to shut down the Tea Party" (by spying on their emails).

"Obama is going to criminalize anti-Obama criticism" (by spying on Facebook).

Raise money and run ads in red states associating Nancy Pelosi with the whole scheme.

These sound out there (and are), but: 1) there is a grain of truth embedded in each one; 2) they speak viscerally to things people care about; 3) they will get an emotional reaction.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#462

Post by reedlaw »

AsymetricCom wrote: post #126
RyanZAG wrote: post #24

I'm in the process of moving any Saas offerings I use off USA-affiliated companies, but it's actually more difficult than I first thought. I believe there might even be a very profitable market in simply duplicating the functionality of Saas offerings at a higher price with security/privacy guarantees in Germany/HK/etc. Might be the next hot business to be in? You'd be surprised as to the number of people seeking alt…

How about a local cloud? I understand that this may seem pointless, as you're owning and paying for all the hardware, but it would really help in deployment, scaling and maintenance just like a "classic" cloud service can.

That sounds great. What if there were an email client that included an email server? If families left one desktop on 24/7 they could all use it as an email server. An open source email client could also include built in PGP or OTR encryption. Anyone know if it's feasible from a deliverability standpoint? Domain registration and DKIM signing may be tricky for the average user. As well as dealing with blacklisting, of course. But if it became prevalent maybe all of these difficulties could be overcome by instituting a new, truly decentralized infrastructure. Key exchange would still be an issue but could be achieved using a mobile app with QR code scanning.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#463

Post by nilved »

MarcScott wrote: post #320

Can you imagine if this had been the response from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo when the FISA court demanded they hand over data? I commend Ladar Levison.

If I was using Google, Microsoft or Yahoo I wouldn't have found out that my primary email account was shut down abruptly, my subscription canceled without refund and my email lost without any ability to download it. Not sure if that's really a worthwhile tradeoff for the average person.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#464

Post by shirro »

Anyone care to comment on the chances services like LastPass are compromised in some way? I would expect they would have been approached. Even if the data is end-to-end encrypted there have to be ways - injecting something client side etc.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#465

Post by reedlaw »

jaekwon wrote: post #451
greendata wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, these US Gov contractors and agencies systematically destroying our industry and our prospects. As a community, let's shun and shame all those who continue work for those agencies (NSA/CIA/FBI/DIA/DEA) both directly and as contractors from this date forward. If you didn't quite in August 2013, we don't want to hire you. If you quite now in disgust, we should view that in a positive light. If you or your compa…

Should I still use Golang? Would making crypto-software in Golang make it less secure? Would the irony be worth it? Is it a worthy language?

Go is open source so anyone is free to inspect it for backdoors. I would be very surprised if Google, on behalf of the NSA, tried to sneak anything in like that. It would also be fairly obvious if it used the underlying OS's networking to send info back.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#466

Post by reedlaw »

Filligree wrote: post #343
sneak wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote an article a year or two ago entitled "Don't Be Evil, or comply with the PATRIOT Act?" The companies with the ability to move all operations out of US jurisdiction/coercion who don't do so are complicit in all of this.

Which companies would that be? I can imagine what would happen to Google if, through some dark miracle, their leadership decided to do this. Most of their top engineers live in America. So do the leaders, but ignore them, we've already decided they want this. The employees don't, though: There are eleven thousand people, there, who'll need to be relocated to - where? Europe, probably Ireland, where many of them have…

The would do far better to spend a billion on lawyers and lobbyists.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#468

Post by reedlaw »

MrKurtz wrote: post #331
guelo wrote: post #183

The US government is destroying one of the few bright spots in the American economy with its out of control military. It is unconscionable. And the sad thing is it has been enabled by the betrayal by many of the web 2.0 giants, Facebook, Google etc. Google especially is sad to see since they were willing to forgo the Chinese market on principle, but then decided that taking on the authoritarian US government was too…

If you are seriously suggesting that abandoning the US market is a realistic option, especially for a multibillion dollar corporation, then you are (and I'm not using this word lightly) an idiot . Not to mention that there is no US equivalent to the rampant human rights violations and censorship in China.

Censorship and monitoring are a given in China. The US was supposedly a bastion of freedom with a long history of protecting individual rights.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#469

Post by rorrr2 »

adrianwaj wrote: post #433
lmkg wrote: post #15

For the unfamiliar: Lavabit was a webmail service, that (claimed to) encrypt emails in such a way that they literally did not have access to the content stored on their own servers. The linked email would lend some credence to those claims. It was originally designed in contrast to gmail scanning your email for targeted advertising, but my imperfect memory says that their system should also have been resilient to "we…

"encrypt emails in such a way that they literally did not have access to the content stored on their own servers" how is that possible? I'm curious to know as to how they achieved that technically. I mean if the user is reading an email in their browser, then it would've had to have been created on the server first.

It all happens on the client side. Servers only store the encrypted emails and have no idea what the contents or the keys are.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#470

Post by gorbachev »

sneak wrote: post #187
dkulchenko wrote: post #138

This is infuriating, and the worst part is that a clear solution isn't in sight. Sure, we can fight this in the courts, and a few secret programs might get shut down, but operations will just continue under a different name. We can encrypt our data, move our services and data offshore, but that just paints a big target on our heads - doesn't actually address the fundamental issue. This is supposed to be a democracy,…

The only nonviolent solution I've found is to move away and stop paying taxes to the US war machine. Don't use or support services that pay US taxes, either. It's what I did. PS: It is very, very, very difficult, because most of the people you care about will not move with you.

That may or may not be the best solution available to you, and one that I've started to consider very, very seriously as well, given that I have a EU passport.

However, if you're a US citizen, you do have other choices. I think the only real permanent solution is to organize and vote the totalitarian representatives out of US Congress. Vote out every single incumbent and vote for representatives that care about We The People rather than their own re-electability.

That'll take at least a decade, minimum, possibly much, much longer.

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