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Comment by wereHamster | Hacker News Reader

Funny that this comes from *.gov. It's in their (the governments) interest to keep traffic unencrypted so that they can intercept and store everything (makes life of CIA/FBI/NSA easier). Why bother enforcing HTTPS? /me confused

The people at NSA are probably like "Oh god why? No, stahp it".

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It's almost as if the government is made up of many departments and people who have different goals and values...

And this is a White House policy, with their official blog post and rationale here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/06/08/https-everywhere-...

"It is critical that federal websites maintain the highest privacy standards for the users of its online services. With this new action, we are driving faster internet-wide adoption of HTTPS and promoting better privacy standards for the entire browsing public."

(Disclaimer: I work on https://https.cio.gov, at GSA.)

The government also have an interest in ensuring that the nation's businesses don't fuck up due to easily preventable infosec failure. Because infosec fails equals lost consumer confidence, lost economic development, lost taxes and much else besides. Governments have wider interests beyond simply sniffing all your traffic.

This is why the UK's National Cyber Security Centre - which is the friendly business-and-civilian-facing side of GCHQ - publish lots of guidance telling people to use TLS.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?num=20&q=allintext%3Ahttps+s...

Oh, I get it. Government illegal hacking and capturing of data due to increased infosec doesn't equal to lost consumer confidence, lost taxes and all that (or only to a lesser extent). Priorities, eh..

It's only in the NSA's interest so long as having open access to criminal communications is more valuable than allowing all of their flock to walk around unprotected.

Eventually the balance will flip, and our protectors will come to the rescue! Just in time, I'm sure.

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