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Phil Zimmermann's New Venture Will Offer Strong Privacy By Subscription

Posted by timothy on from the sounds-like-a-pretty-good-plan dept.

New submitter quantic_oscillation7 writes with this excerpt from the Register: "Phil Zimmermann and some of the original PGP team have joined up with former U.S. Navy SEALs to build an encrypted communications platform that should be proof against any surveillance. The company, called Silent Circle, will launch later this year, when $20 a month will buy you encrypted email, text messages, phone calls, and videoconferencing in a package that looks to be strong enough to have the NSA seriously worried. ... While software can handle most of the work, there still needs to be a small backend of servers to handle traffic. The company surveyed the state of privacy laws around the world and found that the top three choices were Switzerland, Iceland, and Canada, so they went for the one within driving distance."

9 of 219 comments (clear)

  1. Help me out here... by icebike · · Score: 4, Insightful

    encrypted email, text messages, phone calls, and videoconferencing

    With the proper encryption software on the endpoints, and properly encrypted storage, why does the server location even matter?

    If nothing was actually stored on the server (or if everything stored there was encrypted with keys unknown to the operators) there would be no point in any government agency grabbing the server other than to shut it down. And nothing prevents that better than multiple sites.

    It would seem to me the best solution would be for that server to have zero knowledge about the content of any data, and serve as a store and forward repository for content where one or the other party is off line (file transfer or email). For Video conferencing and text messages the servers might serve only as a routing agent for firewall piercing (where each participant is behind a firewall). But in no case should it contain un-encrypted data, and all logging should be to /dev/null.

    Almost all of this is available today using a variety of off the shelf software with PGP keys, etc.

    Wouldn't concentrating this traffic in a single place make it easier to monitor? If nothing else, a monitoring agency can gain the equivalent of pen register data simply by doing packet analysis at the upstream of such a service provider.

    Wouldn't merely subscribing to such a service (and leaving a money trail) become a red flag?

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    1. Re:Help me out here... by girlintraining · · Score: 4, Insightful

      With the proper encryption software on the endpoints, and properly encrypted storage, why does the server location even matter?

      You're new here. Okay, from the top ... If the server gets disappeared in some government raid, then the services offered by said server are no longer available. Sorta obvious there. The internet requires some types of centralization to function; As to any services that run on top of it. DNS, e-mail, Facebook, BGP, etc. -- everything on a packet-based network which lacks broadcast/multicast ability needs to have a static point of entry into whatever superstructure you build on top of it.

      In this case, the server acts as a mediator of identities: Person A wants to talk to Person B, so Person A subs Person B's public key, and the server returns Person B's IP address, drop box, or whatever, thus allowing the transaction to complete.

      It would seem to me the best solution would be for that server to have zero knowledge about the content of any data

      The server would regard the data as a binary blob with a source and destination. You know, just like a router does. Except the data is encrypted, so the only useful data that can be recovered is where it's going, and where it's coming from.

      But in no case should it contain un-encrypted data, and all logging should be to /dev/null.

      But what if someone unlinked /dev/null? Server should immediately self-destruct, Mission Impossible style? :P

      Almost all of this is available today using a variety of off the shelf software with PGP keys, etc.

      One word: Convenience. And another word: Cheaper.

      Wouldn't concentrating this traffic in a single place make it easier to monitor?

      Dude, the NSA is building a massive data center under a mountain in Arizona to monitor every packet sent or received on the internet domestically as you read this. The "single place" is now the entire network. Europe is doing the same thing, but requiring ISPs to store all the data instead. If you want something hard to monitor, go back to sneakernet and drop boxes.

      Wouldn't merely subscribing to such a service (and leaving a money trail) become a red flag?

      I see that you're paying with cash, instead of credit card. You filthy terrorist. Well, actually, everything these days is a red flag. Carrying a bottle of water in your car? You must be using drugs. Breast implants? Possible weapons of mass distraction. Driving a car at the speed limit -- you're paying too close of attention, you must be up to no good. Ah, the rationalizations are endless. Look, there's no technology on this planet that's going to save you from a government that decides (for whatever reason) to make you disappear. All these laws, the constitution, your rights, it's all for show and it always has been. The powerful do whatever they want, and then give it post-facto legitimacy after the fact.

      All that said, I do all my browsing on Tor. Which mostly includes posting to slashdot and reading the Skyrim wiki. If you encrypt everything, and everyone else does the same, then you have made stateful packet inspection a waste of time. Nobody should be sending packets in the clear these days anyway -- most of you are reading this from a processor with an AES encryption/decryption module built into the CPU that can run at gigabit speeds with very little overhead. -_-

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    2. Re:Help me out here... by Phrogman · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Our current Canadian government (Harper's Regime) would quite likely be willing to hand over all Canadian internet traffic to the US free of charge, even before they request it. Harper seems to worship the Republican party sadly :(

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      "The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
  2. Canada is a questionable choice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Are they aware of the Canadian Conservative party's utter contempt for online privacy and willingness to grant broad snooping powers with no oversight to completely unqualified authorities? All without a warrant? Bill C-11 is currently in the process of being rammed through along with plenty of other unpopular legislation. Need I even mention the unabashed kowtowing to the whims of U.S. media conglomerates?

    "You can either stand with us or with the child pornographers" - Vic Toews, Minister of Public Safety.

  3. What do SEALs have to do with privacy? by guanxi · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What do SEALs have to do with it? Are they going to infiltrate the datacenters of privacy violators and blow them up? Secure this company's underwater cables? Now some NSA or CIA signals intelligence veterans might be helpful.

    1. Re:What do SEALs have to do with privacy? by Phat_Tony · · Score: 5, Insightful

      They may have any amount of legitimate expertise to contribute. Even if it's just on the business/managerial side of things and not the software/encryption side, not that that's necessarily the case.

      But you know one big thing they contribute just by being there? This company will be accused of being anti-American, of "helping the terrorists win." There's nothing that will help inoculate them against that as much as having a couple of combat veterans as founders.

      And to those who will say the presence of veterans means you can't trust this organization because they will provide a backdoor for the feds, the people in our armed forces hold a range of political opinions, they are not all clones. And there are a lot of them who agree with a libertarian or traditional conservative view of highly restricted government power and lots of freedom. A lot of people in the military are there to fight for our freedom, and that includes opposing the Orwellian encroachments of our own government.

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  4. Re:They better not do the mistake of Hushmail... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If we want freedom we have to accept an increase in terrorism an violated children. This is a very tough call that we should not avoid discussing. Anyone has evidence on how many children, synagogues we have to sacrifice for how much children? Sure would be interesting reading.

  5. Re:They better not do the mistake of Hushmail... by cheekyjohnson · · Score: 4, Insightful

    personally, I am ok with a backdoor, provided that there are some proper controls around it, such as:

    - The government is entirely composed of perfect beings that would only use the backdoor against actual criminals.

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  6. Re:They better not do the mistake of Hushmail... by Serpents · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They say "Once a Marine, always a Marine". I guess it also applies to SEALs. That's why I'd never use such a service as long as former US (or any other country's, for that matter) military/government employees are involved. I just t believe they be too easily convinced that "the greater good" or "national security" demand that they give the government free access to the system.