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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

I think you may be forgetting that it's not all-or-nothing. Not everyone uses Chrome.

I can't speak to a slide deck; We've only seen some slides for one program (PRISM). I am quite sure that NSA has several different programs variously encompassing collection and decryption. Hopefully in the next few days or weeks we'll see details about more of them.

I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility for a nation-state adversary with a ca. $10bn annual budget (that happens to be the same country where Google lives) to get a copy of Google's key, no.

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Far more than enough people use Chrome (or a different browser with cert pinning) with GMail that such an activity by the NSA would already have been tripped.

This is how other hacked SSL certs have been caught in the wild, remember? Do you think Iran has more GMail users than the U.S.?

Even my own S/MIME private key the NSA wouldn't be able to get a hold of without actually having to take my smartcard, and I'd certainly notice that.

Either way, there's something that the NSA has actually screwed up so I'm honestly a bit surprised that people are still arguing so much about a FISA compliance API. That horse is already essentially dead and buried. So dead and buried that others are saying that tptacek is tearing down a strawman for still mentioning it...

I am talking about entirely passive, offline decryption attacks, not MITM. Think beam splitters.

I'm sure there are browsers out there that won't negotiate PFS DHE modes with Google (which were only enabled a year ago serverside anyway). NSA has had long-haul and undersea fibers tapped for many years.

Cert pinning won't help because it's not MITM.

Then we should definitely consider DDG, a much smaller company in the same country, sharing its keys with NSA. They too might be under some gag order that not only stops them from saying that they are compromised but also gagged to say that their users are anonymous so that all the terrorists, law breakers and cheating husbands use this service because of a false sense of security. It is not beyond the realm of possibility.

But everything that is plausible is not probable.

> Then we should definitely consider DDG, a much smaller company in the same country, sharing its keys with NSA.

Do we not? The only reason to think that the situation for Google and DDG is different is that DDG may be insignificant enough to ignore.

Again, just to keep stomping on this bit of urban legendry: while courts can issue gag orders for FISA directives, they cannot compel people to lie.

And I agree with it. I was addressing a different view altogether. There seems to be a very widespread paranoia that the worst possible event is the one that is occurring and that all entities but the user are collaborating willingly to make it happen. What is surprising is that most of the people here are US citizens who at least have some of their rights intact, enough for the companies to fight back as they have publicly acknowledged that they do to as much extent as possible. I am more worried about the legal requests from US government for data about non US citizens. Does there even exist a legal system to prevent mass unmonitored snooping on them?

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