Comment by allovernow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by allovernow | Hacker News Reader

>Ordinary people don’t exchange email messages that any powerful adversary would bother to read, and for those people, encrypted email is LARP security.

We are literally living in an age where the NSA is spoofing cell towers to intercept and save unencrypted (and probably encrypted) traffic to a database that will probably be around as long as the NSA exists. This is naive and everyone should be taking precautions against the kind of power that a true authoritarian government would literally kill for.

I'm also personally insulted to be accused of LARPing for taking steps to preserve my privacy. Even if something like protonmail isn't perfect, assuming it isn't compromised it's orders of magnitude better than outlook, Google, et al who are literally scanning your messages.

Edit: let me clarify my point, because people seem to be misinterpreting what I'm saying. The fact that encrypted email is partially broken does not mean that it doesn't currently reduce the leak surface. If I send 5 emails from a service like protonmail to @outlook.com and 5 emails to @gmail.com, that's two fractured datasets vs sending 10 from a Gmail account where they're all scanned into one database. Locks are trivially picked but that doesn't mean I'm LARPing to everytime I leave my house and lock my doors.

If your adversary is NSA, and your defense is Protonmail, you are literally LARPing. You don't believe Protonmail protects you from NSA; the reason you're using it is because you know what you're sending and receiving isn't interesting enough to target. If you had real secrets, you would not send them through a Protonmail-encrypted email; you would make other arrangements.

You're ok with Google and Microsoft building a profile of intimate details on everyone who uses their services?

This isn't about having an adversary now, this is about minimizing future risk. A database of personal data is one index or scan away from being used to Target someone. Imagine what the Soviet government could do with information about your purchasing habits, organization membership, political leanings, religious participation. It's happening right now in China.

The fact that you don't have anything nefarious to hide doesn't mean you shouldn't be worried about the existence of such databases. I'm not hiding drug and weapons deals from the NSA, I'm trying to minimize how much information about myself leaks to people who have no business collecting it. All people should be similarly cautious. Unfortunately this isn't the kind of thing that matters to most until it's too late.

How many laws or executive orders or judge rulings do you think it would take before even the U.S. government could trivially abuse such information to target someone? What if you're a whistleblower like Assange? What if you piss off the wrong police officer? You haven't heard of corrupt cops harassing citizens and who stuck their neck out a little too far?

Bad actors exist all over society. It is only rational to minimize the amount of ammunition they may have against you, even if you aren't planning anything nefarious. The problem with this kind of digital surveillance, regardless of whether it is by government or corporation, is that the stored data is permanent and easily harnessed. Let's not even get into the power that such bits and pieces confer to actors with access to even simple ML technology.

I don't understand the reaction that people seem to have toward the desire for maximizing privacy.

I honestly don't care what superficial steps you take towards minimizing dragnet surveillance. Go right ahead. My problem is with communicating to ordinary people that encrypted email is reasonably safe to use to protect secrets. It is not.

It's substantially better than nothing, is it not? Do you disagree that it requires more effort on the part of a malicious actor when emails are sent from on ostensibly encrypted email service?

Do your house doors not have locks because locks are easy to pick?

Further, wouldn't encrypted email, even in current implementation, be much more effective in keeping secrets if everyone used it? You can do much less with metadata than with email contents, and the fact that leaks of plaintext archives may happen eventually doesn't mean that all archives will be leaked.

The article has a valid point but shaming people by accusing them of larping is IMO irresponsible.

Encrypted email is not substantially better than nothing in the cases where security actually matters. If the metadata of your message can get you arrested, or if an accidental plaintext reply to a message can get your bank account zeroed out, then using a system that carries those risks is worse than nothing. When we talk about secure messaging, those are the use cases we must consider.

It’s worse than nothing. People who know their message isn’t secure can adjust what they say accordingly.

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