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Edward Snowden’s exposure of the illegal mass surveillance of basically everybody conducted by the NSA and GCHQ, has and is still causing international political fallout. Hijacking diplomatic flights and using anti-terror legislation to intimidate journalists, aren’t doing much to help matters.

Glyn Moody suggests that, given the widespread abuse of communication technology by the security services, campaigning to get everyone online may not be such a good idea.

Here’s my response:

People shouldn’t necessarily throw away an entire technology just because a few (thousand) bad apples abuse it. As technologists, what this means is that we need to build in safeguards (encryption, obfuscation, anonymous routing etc etc) which make such abuses impossible in the future.

This is already starting to happen (almost every other post on Hacker news these days is some new product that solves one part of the puzzle).

Everyone can do something:

Joe User can do some simple things – install the EFF’s HTTPS Everywhere plugin, and use email encryption (if we can make encryption ubiquitous then we make the PRISM/Tempora kind of abuse much much harder).

Network admins can do things like move their DNS over to OpenNIC (a drop in replacement domain name system run by volunteers outside of government control, often without any logging of queries) and use DNSCrypt to encrypt lookups.

Coders can look at throwing their weight behind an open source project – perhaps add encryption support to their favourite mail client (or make the UX easier), or take a look around at some of the decentralisation projects going on (particularly worth looking at the #indiewebcamp community).

Basically, we need more engagement, not less. Decisions are made by those who show up, and as Tesco put it, “Every little helps” :)

What are your thoughts?

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email-sending-letter An email bridge is something that allows messages from Elgg, group discussion messages, direct message notifications etc, to be directly replied to from your email client.

I needed to get something like this implemented for a client project, and thankfully there was a third party open source plugin written by Michael Jett which did most of the work for me.

The Jettmail project is still under active development, and at time of writing was missing two key bits of functionality that I needed:

  1. Direct reply-to email functionality (you could send messages from an email link, but direct reply-to functionality was missing).
  2. Direct person to person message support.

I have made my own modifications to Jettmail to add this functionality, and also created a plugin to rewrite the reply-to email line appropriately for each object.

» My modifications to Jettmail…
» Jettmail reply-to plugin…

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The fallout from the Snowden affair seems to keep coming, with the shuttering of not one but two secure email services.

For those who have been living under a rock for the past month or so, Edward Snowden is the whistleblower and political dissident who leaked evidence of vast illegal US and UK internet surveillance projects, and who has currently been granted asylum in Russia. Given the American government’s shockingly poor record on the treatment of its political prisoners, as well as their clear desire to make an example of him, I for one am relieved Russia stepped up to its obligations under international law. Granting Mr Snowden some respite from persecution, however temporary that may be, was both legally and morally the right thing to do, even if the cognitive dissonance that I feel from the reversal of the traditional narrative is giving me a migraine.

Known in crypto-analysis circles as “The Rubber Hose technique”.

Lavabit, a Texas based provider of encrypted email apparently used by Snowden, shut down to avoid becoming “complicit in crimes against the American people”. Later Silent Circle, based in Maryland, did the same, taking the view that it was better to close down and destroy its servers than to deal with the inevitable bullying.

The message seems to be simple. You can’t rely on the security of services where the data is out of your control, especially if the machines or companies involved have ties to the USA, but to say you’re safe from this sort of thing because you use a non-us provider (as many seem to be saying) is frankly delusional.

For those who are looking for alternatives to giving all your data to a third party, I do suggest you check out the #indieweb community, especially if you’re a builder. #indiewebcamp-uk is happening in September in Brighton, RSVP here.

It seems it is fast becoming a dangerous time to be a software creator, and no matter how secure your platform, you always run the risk of the rubber hose technique. As an industry, we are living in “interesting times“, it will be interesting where we go from here.

Update: Graham Klyne points out that Silent circle haven’t shuttered their end-to-end encryption offerings.

Image “Security” by XKCD.