Earlier quoted context omitted.
When did unconstitutional massive surveillance become justice?
What does massive surveillance have to do with the Lavabit action?
It's the cause for it.
Lavabit SSL Cert Revoked
171–180 of 321 posts
Re: Lavabit SSL Cert Revoked
#172I'm sure this comment will be buried, but I sleep better at night knowing HN can still get its panties in a wad over tramplings of freedom and the abuse of the system -- long after the main stream media has lost interest. The young and old hackers reading these posts will no doubt start spending frontal lobe CPU cycles on solutions that will find their agile way into the public sphere in months, not years.
Re: Lavabit SSL Cert Revoked
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
As long as the engineers who design and build the internet care, we can do ok. If the protocols that run the web are so easily compromised, it raises all kinds of problems with the underlying, somewhat invisible, functions to how the world works. That manifests itself as a liability to for-profit corporations. It also is something that the cat pictures people care about -- how many of them want their webcams capturin…
> As long as the engineers who design and build the internet care, we can do ok. If the engineers who designed and built the internet cared about privacy, internet protocols wouldn't completely ignore privacy. They designed a massive routed network that involves packet forwarding between random untrusted nodes and then built a bunch of plain-text protocols on top (SMTP, HTTP, etc). > how many of them want their webca…
> If the engineers who designed and built the internet cared about privacy
I believe Vint Cerf cares an awful lot about privacy. But, as he has stated countless times, this internetwork was supposed to be an experiment. Who would ever design a real network with only billions of addresses?
Re: Lavabit SSL Cert Revoked
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree with the premise. I don't believe that a service should be required by law to provide the possibility for the government to intercept the activity of its users. You can always say "but the child pornographers!" or, "but the terrorists!"... but... no, sorry. I believe that people should have the ability to engage in total privacy. The fact that the US gov't is doing this because of Snowden (a person I admir…
> I believe that people should have the ability to engage total privacy. They already have the ability to do this. That's not what you are asking for. What you are really asking for is: "I believe that people should have the ability to engage total privacy through any means of communication they so choose."
Why should privacy be restricted to select mediums?
Re: Lavabit SSL Cert Revoked
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree with the premise. I don't believe that a service should be required by law to provide the possibility for the government to intercept the activity of its users. You can always say "but the child pornographers!" or, "but the terrorists!"... but... no, sorry. I believe that people should have the ability to engage in total privacy. The fact that the US gov't is doing this because of Snowden (a person I admir…
Your argument against the ability to wiretap child pornographers and terrorists is "no, sorry". That's not a very complete argument.
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Re: Lavabit SSL Cert Revoked
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your argument against the ability to wiretap child pornographers and terrorists is "no, sorry". That's not a very complete argument.
His argument is clearly that people have a right to privacy. It says so in his next sentence. The 'no, sorry' is him discarding the emotional plea that often justifies invading a person's privacy in the first place ("please, won't somebody think of the children!").
Well, what about the children?
Serious question.
I say it's an incomplete argument because there is no mention of how we should go about prosecuting child pornographers and terrorists, rescuing missing persons when phone/email records are our only clue, and so on. There's just "no, sorry", the right to privacy trumps these things under all possible circumstances.
The question remains.. why?
Why is a world with ideally zero ability to prosecute child porn (to pick one) a world we should want to live in? Laws don't mean much without the ability to enforce them, so are you advocating living in a lawless world? Police powers can be abused, but does that literally mean we should end all police, at least as it pertains to crimes involving communication such as plotting murder, child porn, etc.?
That's what's missing from "no, sorry".
Re: Lavabit SSL Cert Revoked
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your argument against the ability to wiretap child pornographers and terrorists is "no, sorry". That's not a very complete argument.
That's perfectly valid, since those examples were first trotted out prior to that with no argument. If it's so obvious why we should treat those as special cases, it should be trivial to explain why.
Just so I understand, you want me to explain why it is just to wiretap child pornographers and murderers. Is that right?
Re: Lavabit SSL Cert Revoked
#178Am I reading into this right? The court declared he must hand over the private key to the SSL encryption on his server so the government could do as they wished with the traffic... and then Levison revoked the key, thus making it useless to everyone?
Re: Lavabit SSL Cert Revoked
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, let's keep this in perspective. The problem here is Lavabit was specifically designed to disallow lawful intercepts of individuals. Targeting individuals is absolutely the right way to go about a lawful intercept. Sucking up all traffic like the NSA has been doing is totally overbroad and invasive. But the whole point of the asymmetric encryption feature of Lavabit was to make it impossible for anyone but the acc…
"The problem here is Lavabit was specifically designed to disallow lawful intercepts of individuals." This is not True. Lavabit made it clear in their TOS that they had no interest in concealing illegality, they complied fully and willingly with all warrants targeting individual users. Their premise was to protect your privacy from untargetted blanket surveillance.
What's your source? That conflicts with the New Yorker reporting on the trial proceedings.
It also belies common sense, since Lavabit offers a form of encryption that even they cannot decrypt.
Source: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/10/how-l...
Re: Lavabit SSL Cert Revoked
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I believe that people should have the ability to engage total privacy. They already have the ability to do this. That's not what you are asking for. What you are really asking for is: "I believe that people should have the ability to engage total privacy through any means of communication they so choose."
Why should privacy be restricted to select mediums?
That's a loaded question and I'm not going to play that game.