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Phil Zimmermann's New Venture Will Offer Strong Privacy By Subscription
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."
Canada is decent, but they can still be forced to modify their code to catch people on demand of Interpol there.
Look what happened with Hushmail.
Link is http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/14/pgp_seal_encrypted_communications/ since it wasn't in the summary.
Burns: We're building a casino!
McAllister: Arrr. Give me 5 minutes.
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?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
That's happened before, but it's still perplexing after the OP linked The Register in the submission. *shrugs*
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
But if it's made up of a bunch of ex-navy seals, can you really trust that it's going to be secure against american intelligence access? And if it *IS*, what does that say about these EX-SEAL personnel? The old 'loyalty to your job' versus 'loyalty to your country' :D
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.
As a Canadian resident, I wouldn't count on our privacy laws remaining strong, or - above all - being strongly enforced - with the Conservative party in power. They should have gone with Sweden or Switzerland.
I'm a little segfault, short and stout.
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.
They just nee to make sure they don't discuss any details of the service at the airport...
Never mind a pay raise, I'd chip in for a redundancy package if I thought he'd take it.
They teamed up with Navy SEALs to develop this. That means a branch of the US Government is involved.
No thanks.
No one is adopting "austerity measures" for fun, and those measures are not disastrous, nor have those measures cause any sort of recession etc. The underlying economies of countries adopting "austerity measures" are disasters! These "austerity measures" are a last-gasp attempt to prevent total collapse of economies, not some 1%-er imposed hardship!
Countries that wildy overspent beyond their means (e.g., Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain) are finding that no one now believe that ending them even more money is a smart idea. Countries that made some reasonable attempt to live within their means (e.g., Switzerland, Germany) are still fine, if they don't let the others drag them down. Ireland actually embrace their austerity measures, and by all measures seems to be on the path to recovery without collapse.
And clearly your definition of "Rent Seekers" is "people I don't like", unless there's some "tax cut for the MAFIAA" bill I haven't seen (which, admittedly, wouldn't surprise me).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It was a banking collapse. Iceland's economy is now growing, lives improving, and most importantly, the economic disparity, which is the source of so many social problems, is lessening.
If you are a middle class 23 year old in Iceland, your financial future is brighter than a middle class 23 year old in South Carolina.
You are welcome on my lawn.
My definition of "rent seekers" is people who accumulate wealth while contributing nothing to society.
It's called the Paul Ryan budget.
Greek workers put in as many hours as German workers. They retire no earlier than German workers. When you talk about "living within their means" you aren't talking about the working and middle classes. The ones that didn't "live within their means" were entirely the financial sector and the "1%".
Yes. the "rent seekers" whose income is entirely in capital gains.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I hate to respond to my own post; but in the interest of fairness, here's what PZ has to say about backdoors, et al.
I also note that he says the source to PGP is still Open.
You bet: the energy industry, telecommunications industry, banking industry, pharmaceutical industry, private capital industry, insurance industry, all of Wall Street, hell, the entire financial sector. Start at the top of the Fortune 500 and work your way down. Rent seeking with exceptions you can count on one hand.
Yes, I think that covers it, but I'm sure I can think of a few more if I think about it a while.
You believe economies follow the laws of physics? Why? Money is completely virtual. It can be both created and destroyed. It does not respect any natural law. Since 2000, 40% of the net worth of Americans has disappeared, almost entirely from the middle and working classes while the net worth of the top 1% more than doubled. Do you believe most of the world suddenly became worth less? That work suddenly became worth less? Did humanity suddenly become worth less? Did rich guys suddenly become twice as valuable to the world? Does any of that sound like behavior according to the "laws of physics"?
Yes, really. I would recommend two books by Joseph Stiglitz, both written in 2010:
Time for a Visible Hand: Lessons from the 2008 World Financial Crisis, Jones, S.G., Ocampo, J.A. & Stiglitz, J.E. (Ed.), Oxford University Press.
and..
Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn't Add Up, Fitoussi, J-P., Sen, A. & Stiglitz, J.E., The New Press.
Given what I take to be your view of our current political/economic situation, I would highly recommend Stiglitz' most recent,
The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future, Stiglitz, J.E., W.W. Norton & Company.
Honestly lgw. Take a look at these books and read them with an open mind. In fact, I'll go out on a limb and send you a copy of one of them if you promise to read it through.
Oh, Stiglitz has won a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, a Clark Medal, and was Chief Economist of the World Bank until he realized the whole thing was a huge scam and resigned. His book-length analysis of the 2008 world economic crisis was exceptional in its criticism of globalization and the IMF. He's probably the top living economist and rather unique in that discipline in that he has a both a first-rate mind and a fully-human heart. Most important, he really knows what he's talking about, in real-world, practical terms.
You are welcome on my lawn.