Tag Archives: snowden

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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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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.

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IFTTT (short for If This Then That) is a very powerful service that one can use to hook a number of different cloud services together in cool ways, and it’s a service I make a fair amount of use of.

Like many of us who make use of cloud services, the Snowden revelations, that the US and UK intelligence communities had hooks into all the major cloud services (or perhaps a better word would be “confirmations”, since many of us suspected this was going on for a while), have given me pause to re-evaluate the services I use and trust.

So then, what of IFTTT?

With all the hooks it has into other services, it does seem to represent the ultimate in back doors. Out of necessity of function, the permissions granted for each service are quite wide ranging, and we only have it on faith that they won’t be abused. Ok, so it’s not as bad as them knowing my password, since I can click a button and revoke access at any time, but until then IFTTT have full access.

As a US company, and through no fault of their own, IFTTT are compromised when it comes to security, since they’re all backdoored by the patriot act. I suspect that if they haven’t been forced to share access to accounts, it’s only because they are still relatively small fish (when compared to the likes of Google) and are only really used by the technical subset of internet users. But as they grow, it’s only a matter of time before they appear on someone’s radar.

In addition, their business model has always been a little bit of a head scratcher. I suspect the whole service came about from a “wouldn’t it be cool if…” kind of conversation, rather than a set agenda to make money (quite right too), but servers don’t pay for themselves, and I do wonder how long it will be before In-Q-Tel come calling.

Of course, it may be moot, since most of the services that IFTTT connects to are also US based, and for that matter, other countries are almost certainly forcing backdoors into their cloud services too.

Still, it’s got me pondering self hosted alternatives… any nice #indieweb projects out there?