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Comment by NooneAtAll3 | Hacker News Reader

why would Snowden reveals cause it to close?

"everything is so bad it's hopeless" or smth?

> On August 20, 2013, a final article appeared on Groklaw, explaining that due to pervasive government monitoring of the Internet, there could no longer be an expectation of the sort of privacy online that was necessary to collaborate on sensitive topics. Citing the closure of Lavabit earlier that month, Jones wrote "I can't do Groklaw without your input.... and there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate." and "What I do know is it's not possible to be fully human if you are being surveilled 24/7... I hope that makes it clear why I can't continue. There is now no shield from forced exposure."

Just on the pervasive passive monitoring aspect, I think an under-discussed aspect of the time frame covered in the material of Snowden's leaks is that sites/services by and large wasn't using encrypted protocols (HTTPS).

So much could be intercepted back then because of this. It wasn't until 2010 that various large services—including Yahoo Mail and Facebook—got a kick in their ass by a whitehat browser plugin that allowed anyone on the same network to trivially hijack session cookies of others, stimulating an adoption of HTTPS[1] during 2011-2012.

By the time the Snowden leaks occurred in 2013 the trend was heading toward encrypted-by-default and governments were having to adapt.

[1] https://threatpost.com/facebook-kills-firesheep-new-secure-b...

I thought these “lawful intercept” organisations had their taps inside the data centers after https tsl to the user had already been terminated. And so the infamous ssl removed here slide from prism.

> I thought these “lawful intercept” organisations had their taps inside the data centers after https tsl to the user had already been terminated.

How would that actually work?

TLS runs on the client and the server. There's no "TLS magic box" in between.

https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/security-controls/t...

Like let’s say you have a proxy server like Nginx on a server with a public facing ip address and then it also has access to a private subnet where your application servers are running. A visitor to your website’s browser make a secure https connection the nginx server where https would be terminated and then it would proxy traffic in plain http over your internal private subnet to the app server. And your are in a five eyes country where your intelligence services took it on themselves to follow the nsa or fbis instructions and plug a network device into those private subnets of all the big service providers inside their datacenters that is configured in something like a promiscuous way so it receives all the packets for any device on the network. Then those packets somehow end up in a big nsa datalake.. or something along those lines

But the private subnet does not leave your server.

For large sites, the private subnet is an actual network, with dozens or potentially hundreds of machines on it.

(Or was, back then. These days you can probably collapse all of that into a single medium-sized epyc or something.)

> (Or was, back then. These days you can probably collapse all of that into a single medium-sized epyc or something.)

I know where there are Sun V880s still running Oracle databases in a biggish cluster.

Their processor power, memory capacity, and storage capacity are exactly equivalent to a Raspberry Pi 4 with a biggish SD card.

We have come a long way.

That's a fancy of way of saying "not using HTTPS" which may be what average incompetent shops were doing, but isn't using HTTP everywhere which is the security standard.

> TLS runs on the client and the server. There's no "TLS magic box" in between.

If there was it'd be called Cloudflare :)

Too soon :-D

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