Ed Felten: Why Email Services Should Be Court-Order Resistant

Jah-Wren Ryel sends this excerpt from Ed Felten at Freedom to Tinker: "Commentators on the Lavabit case, including the judge himself, have criticized Lavabit for designing its system in a way that resisted court-ordered access to user data. They ask: If court orders are legitimate, why should we allow engineers to design services that protect users against court-ordered access? The answer is simple but subtle: There are good reasons to protect against insider attacks, and a court order is an insider attack. To see why, consider two companies, which we’ll call Lavabit and Guavabit. At Lavabit, an employee, on receiving a court order, copies user data and gives it to an outside party—in this case, the government. Meanwhile, over at Guavabit, an employee, on receiving a bribe or extortion threat from a drug cartel, copies user data and gives it to an outside party—in this case, the drug cartel. From a purely technological standpoint, these two scenarios are exactly the same: an employee copies user data and gives it to an outside party. Only two things are different: the employee’s motivation, and the destination of the data after it leaves the company."

Comments

Are they completely blind?

[Anonymous Coward]

So a court case that was created as a knee-jerk response to Snowden is arguing that organizations shouldn't take steps to prevent leaks like Snowden .....

Re:Are they completely blind?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's self-consistent and consistent with the way lawyers and judges view the world. In their view, the rules of society aren't defined by the way the world is, but by the way the legislative wants them to be. In their view, upholding the rules is not the job of engineers. It's the job of the police, and justice is the job of lawyers and judges. Lawyers and judges have no problem with telling you that you're wrong to say that 3+2 equals 5 if the law says that it's wrong. By making a system which is resistant to court orders, you're making it impossible for them to uphold the law, and even if you do so to prevent a violation of the law (an illegal leaking of information), that's still wrong, because upholding the law is their job, not yours.

Re:Good model

[Anonymous Coward]

But, as the story yesterday showed, only the company the warrant is issued against can challenge it, not the person they want to collect information about.

So they may well violate your 5th amendmend rights, but the only ones who can do anything about it, is a company whose primary purpose is to minimize cost and maximize shareholder value. Not to protect your rights.

So, adding 2 and 2 together, you don't have any rights.

Re:I love the comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I'd like to appeal my murder...

Yeah, lots of others would like to appeal theirs' too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_execution#United_States

Cameron Todd Willingham was executed February, 2004, for murdering his three young children by arson at the family home in Corsicana, Texas. Nationally known fire investigator Gerald Hurst reviewed the case documents, including the trial transcriptions and an hour-long videotape of the aftermath of the fire scene and said in December 2004 that "There's nothing to suggest to any reasonable arson investigator that this was an arson fire. It was just a fire."[12] In 2010, the Innocence Project filed a lawsuit against the State of Texas, seeking a judgment of "official oppression".[13]

Statistics likely understate the actual problem of wrongful convictions because once an execution has occurred there is often insufficient motivation and finance to keep a case open, and it becomes unlikely at that point that the miscarriage of justice will ever be exposed. In the case of Joseph Roger O'Dell III, executed in Virginia in 1997 for a rape and murder, a prosecuting attorney argued in court in 1998 that if posthumous DNA results exonerated O'Dell, "it would be shouted from the rooftops that ... Virginia executed an innocent man." The state prevailed, and the evidence was destroyed.[14]

Johnny Garrett of Texas was executed February, 1992, for allegedly raping and murdering a nun. In March, 2004, cold-case DNA testing identified Leoncio Rueda as the rapist and murderer of another elderly victim killed four months prior.[15] Immediately following the nun's murder, prosecutors and police were certain the two cases were committed by the same assailant.[16] In both cases, black curly head hairs were found on the victims, linked to Rueda. Previously unidentified fingerprints in the nun's room were matched to Rueda. The flawed case is explored in a 2008 documentary The Last Word.

Jesse Tafero was convicted of murder and executed via electric chair May, 1990, in the state of Florida for the murders of two Florida Highway Patrol officers. The conviction of a codefendant was overturned in 1992 after a recreation of the crime scene indicated a third person had committed the murders.[17]

Carlos DeLuna was executed in Texas in December 1989. Subsequent investigations cast strong doubt upon DeLuna's guilt for the murder of which he had been convicted.[18][19]

Thomas and Meeks Griffin were executed in 1915 for the murder of a man involved in an interracial affair two years previously but were pardoned 94 years after execution. It is thought that they were arrested and charged because they were not wealthy enough to hire competent legal counsel and get an acquittal.[20]

Chipita Rodriguez was hanged in San Patricio County, Texas in 1863 for murdering a horse trader, and 122 years later, the Texas Legislature passed a resolution exonerating her.

The list of wrongly jailed for life is too long to list.

The real subtle reason.

[ttucker]

They ask: If court orders are legitimate, why should we allow engineers to design services that protect users against court-ordered access?

The real answer question is, in what fucking world is it appropriate for courts to say what a private company programs?!? If the encryption is not illegal (it shouldn't be either way, but encryption is still legal in the US) the judiciary has no business saying whether it should be used or not.