Slashdot Mirror
Silent Circle Follows Lavabit By Closing Encrypted E-mail Service
Okian Warrior writes "Silent Circle shuttered its encrypted e-mail service on Thursday, in an apparent attempt to avoid government scrutiny that may threaten its customers' privacy. The company announced that it could 'see the writing on the wall' and decided it would be best to shut down its Silent Mail feature. 'We’ve been debating this for weeks, and had changes planned starting next Monday. We’d considered phasing the service out, continuing service for existing customers, and a variety of other things up until today. It is always better to be safe than sorry, and with your safety we decided that the worst decision is always no decision.' The company said it was inspired by the closure earlier Thursday of Lavabit, another encrypted e-mail service provider that alluded to a possible national security investigation."
Does anyone have replacement recommendations for people who used these services?
The US government is basically forcing technology firms to move else where.
Encryption should be end-to-end. How can you trust someone else to do it for you?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
The same thing the Fourth Amendment is for. Keeping out people who have no business reading your mail.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Anyone who thinks their private communications should be just that... private
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
The customers of the company I work for do not like it when their blueprints are publicly available. Would you like to have your code and documentation searched by gmail to show ads? (What information do these ads leak to the company that pays for it?)
And any "alien" Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo or Google cloud data is up for collection by the NSA. Sounds like a good reason to encrypt at least some of your mail.
extern warranty;
main()
{
(void)warranty;
}
There is one flaw...they may not know what the message says, but they can still tell WHO you are emailing
So i guess, you didn't use envelopes for your mail before email?
Why use clothes even? What do you have to hide?
Why whisper?
That's right... it's called privacy.
I don't think Silent Circle would commit an effective suicide just preventively. Lavabit, while technically not saying a word about NSLs, told us very clearly what the request was. If the government criminals are not idiots, they learned and worded the Silent Circle order in a way that prevented such disclosure.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Yes, that's what the official story may be... but who knows? Just two or three days ago was the whole exposing of how the government admitted that they have been coming up with "alternate explanations" of how they get various pieces of intelligence so that the official explanations don't point to prism/etc. So truly, how can we possibly know?
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
So what'd be "encrypted email" for?
It's like the envelope in snail mail. You put your mail in an envelope to protect it until it arrives at its destination, don't you? Encryption accomplishes the same thing for e-mail.
Okay, playing devil's advocate here.
LavaBit shuts down "citing" pressure they have received from gov't agencies. No evidence is provided to indicate that reason behind the shutdown...just they guy's word.
Given how everybody is rallying against the gov't at this time - could this actually just be an action of protest rather than a true, official, take-down? Everybody will just assume that the gov't forced the take down "just because". Who would be the wiser? Right? Makes their point, right?
Now, we have Silent Circle shutting down because they "see the writing on the wall". What writing, is that, exactly? Certainly, if they (or LavaBit) have a take down notice but can't share it to confirm the take down...we really don't have proof of their motivations do we? So, trusting souls that we are, we have to assume their motivations are real and not hype for political or protest purposes.
Just say'n.
The issue that Silent Circle points out is that SMTP is inherently unable to provide security against traffic analysis. Even if the body of the email is encrypted, the headers cannot be.
So yes, you can run your own email server, and require that only gpg traffic pass through it. But that won't keep you secure against traffic analysis (aka "metadata collection") with collection performed at your ISP.
No that was the bullshit damage control. You know how I know? Don't you remember the guy in England who said he was going to "have a blast" (or something to that effect) in Los Angeles, and was turned around at the US border? They are reading everything. They just don't want you to think that they are.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Their statement about closing the service specifically said they hadn't been contacted so if they have been contacted then they didn't just make an ommission it would have been an outright lie.
Because Lavabit has been officially contacted they can't destroy any data, they can shutup shop to prevent anyone else falling into the net which is what they have done but for anyone who have already used the service and have any data already on the Lavabit servers, it's just a matter of time before their data is decrypted one way or another..
I suspect that Silent Circle are shutting up shop before any warrents arrives, that means that it's completely legal for them to destroy any and all data they have. I wouldn't be surprised if the data is already wiped at a software level and the hardware destruction is either in progress or getting planned.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
Both Lavabit and Silent Circle closed by their own will. What government agents did, or will do, is to force all secure mail providers to give them a backdoor for them to access all that "secure" mail (or else put them in prison). So, for that reason, will not be any secure/private mail in US, if someone claims that do, or is lying already or soon will face the choice to lie to its customers or close.
Or, we could all go back to writing letters. Oddly enough, that still has more legal protections behind it than any other form of communication.
The entire point of all these [not necessarily so recent] revelations is that legal protections are no protection.
Surely the Streisand effect would have already happened - some percentage of people (especially Slashdot readers) would have read that and immediately searched for "pressure cooker backpacks" - and we'd hear about hundreds/thousands of people suddenly gone missing or being detained for questioning.
I mean come on, there's legit concern, there's paranoia, and there's all out tin-foil-nutjob behavior with layered conspiracies hiding deeper multi-level conspiracies. The story about the employer reporting his employee for searching at work sounds 100% legit. Employer is probably engaging the CYA, something corporations have no problem throwing puppies under the bus to do.
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. Freedom is Slavery. The government is here to help.
It sounds like we're trending towards not being allowed to encrypt our own stuff because that automatically means we're doing something shady. There's all sorts of reasons I might want to encrypt information that have nothing at all to do with American national security.
Hopefully some non-American company will step up to the plate and give us this, and we can send a big "Fuck You" to the NSA that says we'll encrypt if we want to, and you can eat shit. My rights aren't defined by your security interests.
Sorry, but the rest of the world doesn't give a crap about what you want, and want to retain our privacy without having to cede it to the US government.
Thanks America, you've now essentially broken the internet, and are only going to make computing less secure for all of us. Welcome to the new world, where industry and government demands full control over technology in order to enforce their will on us.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Who gives a damn?
I see no reason to defend the situations in which I could choose to encrypt something. I am not going to open my stuff up to you so that I can prove I'm not a terrorist unless you have something to suggest that I am. That's not how it works in a free society.
This "we'll assume everyone is guilty and ignore the ones we don't care about" mentality is crap, and in complete opposition to privacy, freedom, and everything else the US claims to hold so dear.
It doesn't matter if I'm discussing something I'd like to patent, my financial statements, my medical condition, having an affair, or planning to BASE jump off a building -- it's none of the governments business, and without evidence to suggest I'm doing something they need to be concerned about, they can fuck off.
This is just an undue control over your citizens, and sadly, everyone else on the planet since these guys are tapping pretty much everything.
That more an more people might choose to encrypt on general principles is something the NSA is just going to have to learn to deal with -- because I see no point in helping them any more than I can avoid.
America is rapidly becoming some of the same things they used to criticize the Soviets for. And that is sad.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/08/lavabit_e-mail.html
Last para:
"When the small companies can no longer operate, it's another step in the consolidation of the surveillance society."
Game. Set. Match.