Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

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I'm only upvoting this not because I have much loyalty or trust left for Google, but because I want many other companies to follow their lead and flood the Administration with such requests.

I still feel this does very little, though. They need to be asking them for much more. They need to ask them to end the spying. Until then I'm still hoping Google, Microsoft, Facebook and others will suffer greatly for this abroad, and lose a ton of business and customers, both small and major.

Maybe then they'll start doing some real lobbying to the government to end the madness, and maybe the government will stop thinking all the spying is worth breaking all international relationships and hurting the US economy in the process.

Until that happens, if Google cares that much about encryption and their users' privacy, they should show me they are willing to implement OTR, ZRTP and PGP in their services. The same goes for Microsoft and Facebook. Otherwise, this press release means nothing except for showing that "they are doing something".

So you'll be happy when the US ends all foreign signals intelligence? Or makes the Internet a safe haven from signals intelligence?

Also: by offering PGP in GMail, Google would harm online security. If you want PGP, install it on your computer. Google won't do anything to stop you.

1. Google probably should offer passive S/MIME on mail. START TLS goes a long way, but providing the same signals about message authenticity to people who IMAP from gmail as who use the web UI would be nice.

A non-google-trusting way to do PGP with a better UI/UX would also be a nice feature for gmail. Just indicating "encrypted" at the message-list view or something. I have PGP working quite nicely in mutt, but a lot of people seem to prefer webmail.

2. I'd actually prefer a world where signals intelligence, outside extremely tactical intelligence, were impossible through technical means. I think we'll be there at some point, just because the cost of protection is dropping.

(confidentiality and message integrity should be feasible for any reasonable government defender at this point. traffic analysis/direction finding/etc. burns bandwidth and latency budgets, so that might be harder, but you can do arbitrarily well.)

The US (government and citizens/private industry) probably has more to gain from universally strong COMSEC vs. effective USG SIGINT.

I think I might prefer that world too. Now: how likely are we to be in that world any time soon?

I'd bet "before 2025", absent some major catastrophe. First you build systems which let platform developers centralize trust, then the essential step is letting individuals or organizations pick their own roots of trust (and some kind of crazy web of trust thing for interchange).

We're doing a pretty good job on mobile of "centralized trust", and also sort of with cloud infrastructure, if not apps.

At least, we'll have secure infrastructure on which people can continue writing insecure applications by 2020-2025. The "people writing insecure applications" won't stop until people stop writing applications, hopefully replaced by non-humans writing applications, maybe in 2050+.

Everytime I think about the S/MIME and PGP issue I can't get away from the fact that you need to give your private key to the client-side JS. I'm not sure we've found all the security flaws we'll find in the browser JS model so that just seems risky to me (especially for digital signature purposes).

And as you mention, you would still have to trust Google.

W3C webcrypto, done in a smart way, is probably one of the most critical pieces of security infrastructure to be built today.

I'm not talking about giving the real PGP or S/MIME to Google; just a UI flag saying "this message has special content, click here to download". And some kind of low-assurance S/MIME signature which just says "was downloaded from gmail" to protect from local modification. I'm not sure how mail clients deal with multiple s/mime signatures (or s/mime + PGP inside).

It's not being done in a particularly smart way; Web Crypto has more to do with enabling pure-web plugin-free streaming media than with enabling secure browser-based PGP.

I think you're thinking of Encrypted Media Extensions https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted-med...

No, I'm thinking about the design decisions the Web Crypto team made and the mailing list posts that supported them.

Presumably all it would take would be Google, Apple, or even Mozilla to do something more real on their own. I'd probably bet on the Chrome doing it more than anyone else.

STARTTLS is supported on both IMAP/SMTP. Email from Google outgoing uses TLS encryption (at least to my mail server), email from my server to Google also uses TLS encryption.

IMAP is already TLS encrypted.

The biggest missing puzzle piece is making it simpler for people to get S/MIME set up (or PGP for that matter), and having it work with all major mail clients (yes, Mail.app is a major mail client).

Right now S/MIME still requires too many steps to get the lay person to set it up, same with PGP, we need something that is secure from the get-go with very minimal effort required on the users part.

The downside is that S/MIME and PGP don't really fit into the online world, no longer will it be simple to open the browser and go look at your email, you will be required to have your keys with you. Securing those keys becomes the second problem, one that has partially been solved with smart cards and other devices that will do signing/encrypting/decrypting on the card without giving up the private key... but loss is still an issue so key escrow becomes a big thing.

It is an interesting problem, with interesting challenges and I look forward to seeing how we as a group of technologists solve them. Once it becomes easy enough for grandma and grandpa to use secure encrypted communication it will become much harder to do wide-scale snooping on data.

The lowest hanging fruit is probably a simple way to get S/MIME certs for mail.app (osx/ios). There isn't really an easy way to get a cert right now as an individual. A "real" cert is around $20-30 from top companies, and maybe $5-10 for others. Obviously someone could do their own for free.

I wish you wouldn't phrase your questions like that as it invites some to accuse you of implying that it's either the US spies on everybody or ends all foreign signals intelligence.

Also, the fellow you replied to didn't specify what sort of spying needs to be stopped. He could have no issue with foreign signals intelligence (which presumably means spying on non-US folks).

The argument is that all meaningful communications (outside military tactical, and even there, a lot of it) is moving to the Internet. Without applying SIGINT to the Internet, you essentially can't have meaningful foreign SIGINT capability anymore. It's very difficult to distinguish between foreign and domestic parts of foreign-origin threats, and even more so on the Internet, at collection time.

(Even worse, as the transport security part gets better, you either need to add a bunch of active-attacker MITM or somehow compromise endpoints. At some point, even if you thought purely passive SIGINT collection was fine, the level of prior restraint on service providers/developers becomes absurd and probably no one would support it; witness the key escrow crypto wars of the 1990s.)

Generally NSA seems to put a good amount of effort into minimization post-collection. But, that only works if you trust them to be 1) forever competent and 2) forever equally ethical.

The parent said absolutely nothing about ending all foreign signals intelligence. You're intentionally dramatizing.

It's not about a few people using those encryption tools. It's about major companies like Google making them mainstream tools, and also making them very easy to use (as easy as it can get).

My point is that Google Mail is an insecure setting from which to deliver PGP.

For heaven's sake: there's a compromise to be reached between sending postcards and using a Brink's truck.

No, there isn't. Protecting secrets cryptographically is an engineering problem. There are right answers and wrong answers, and having Google Mail deliver PGP to you directly is a wrong answer.

First, you know full well that security is a matter of degree, and not binary thing. It's tradeoff against convenience that can be made more easily when there's a trusted third party. We're already willing to trust webmail providers with all our email -- how can it possibly be worse than the status quo if suddenly everyone can use PGP transparently, too?

After this past week, how can you possibly suggest that webmail providers like GMail are trusted third parties?

Well, they are trusted 3rd parties, regardless of whether or not you happen to trust them. Anyone who has a private Gmail account necessarily trusts Gmail.

In any case, the argument isn't that webmail is perfect for implementing PGP. The argument is that

1) no one uses PGP now because no on else uses PGP

2) if webmail providers deployed PGP, everyone would be using PGP

3) some use of PGP is better than no use of PGP

It really seems like some people are cutting off their PGP noses to spite their PGP faces. I remember when the assumption with vegetarianism was that you were either a vegetarian (and never ate meat) or you were a meat eater (and ate meat regularly). So people kept eating meat regularly because they "couldn't give up meat", thus believing in a false choice. If vegetarians had been pragmatic, they'd have realized that would have been much easier, and would save more animals, if you convinced 95% of people to give up meat 95% of the time.

Dear privacy advocates: stop wanting everything yesterday, because it's keeping you from getting something tomorrow. Most change takes place gradually. Webmail providers deploying PGP will instantly create millions of PGP users, which will at the very least serve a valuable educational and awareness purpose. These users will gradually become more concerned with the implementation details, triggering a gradual increase in overall privacy and security.

Because it's a website?

That is one big reason, yes.

I'm curious what the other big reasons are. I send & receive GPG encrypted messages via Gmail occasionally and it's no different than using any other mail provider (of course, I'm using mutt, GnuPG, and SMTP/IMAP and not web-mail).

I would. Any secrets we allow the government to keep are a license to be abused. They're barely capable of following their own laws under the microscope. I doubt they even try so long as the citizens aren't aware of their activities.

Harm online security how?

Here's some background on what's actually going on: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57588752-38/google-to-feds...

> And the surveillance process must comply with the Fourth Amendment.

This phrasing seems to suggest that the intended target of FISA 702 - the US cloud data of non-US-resident non-US-citizens - enjoys Fourth Amendment-based protections, such as the probable cause requirement, under FISA 702. But in fact it seems that (IANAL) FISA 702 is compatible with the Fourth Amendment (if it is) only in the sense that slavery was compatible with the Fifth Amendment: simply because the Fifth Amendment does not apply to slaves. If 702 envisaged non-resident aliens' US cloud data as being protected by the Fourth Amendment then it would presumably require the US government to establish probable cause at the FISC (or some other court). But in fact 702 doesn't seem to require the government to claim any kind of cause or suspicion or even state any purpose or motivation for the search to the FISC. The FISA 702 PowerPoints obtained by the ACLU under FOI make it clear that the US government understands FISA 702 as removing the probable cause requirement http://www.aclu.org/files/pdfs/natsec/faafoia20101129/FAAFBI... .

"if Google cares that much about encryption and their users' privacy, they should show me they are willing to implement OTR, ZRTP and PGP"

That would only make sense if they wouldn't be required to become your key escrow service (=custodians of your private keys). PGP is also a pretty bad choice for private communication, as it offers no forward-secrecy. Something like client-side OTR implementation would be better.

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