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Comment by openasocket | Hacker News Reader

An important thing to note here is that they were served with a "Summons for Records," not a warrant. With a warrant the DHS has to provide probable cause, it has to be signed off on by a judge, and cannot be refused. A summons has none of those things; it can absolutely be refused, at which point they would have to get a warrant.

I'd also like to add that I don't have an ethical problem with a VPN company that keeps logs and turns them over to law enforcement with a valid warrant. Lying about keeping logs, though, I do find unethical, as well as not requiring a warrant for access.

I also think that explicitly not keeping logs to protect users from law enforcement is shady to say the least. If law enforcement has a valid warrant, I don't have an issue with providing them with the data they need to find and prosecute.

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>>> I also think that explicitly not keeping logs to protect users from law enforcement is shady to say the least.

I guess that depends on which law enforcement you are talking about. An FBI agent going after someone distributing child pornography is a rather sympathetic police action. What about a Chinese officer going after someone for "treason"? What about a Russian cop looking for someone who tweeted pics taken at a protest rally? Or what about a Canadian cop asking questions about a teenager in Sweden, someone well outside Canadian jurisdiction? Or what about the FBI agent asking for some celeb's home address? Rather than pick sides, the best answer is to just not collect the data in the first place.

VPN companies operate at an international level. The cops from some countries cannot be trusted. Cops in all countries make mistakes. A few of them our there are corrupt. And often times the person claiming to be a cop is either well outside their authority, or just lying about being a cop. I tell my client's to not even respond to communications from any sort of law enforcement or intelligence agency. Pass it to your lawyers. Let them first verify who and what authority is making the request. Do not leave such determinations to engineers and support staff.

I agree that it depends on who the law enforcement is. I think operating a VPN service for Chinese citizens to evade censorship and not doing logging to protect those users would be ethical, for example. Like I said in another comment, you have to think about the odds of dealing with an LE request you consider unethical, and balance the consequences of providing logs or not providing logs. Personally, I trust the US justice system enough that I wouldn't have a problem with complying with a valid warrant (after legal due diligence, of course). But that's subjective and I understand others may not feel the same way.

> VPN companies operate at an international level. The cops from some countries cannot be trusted. Cops in all countries make mistakes. A few of them our there are corrupt. And often times the person claiming to be a cop is either well outside their authority, or just lying about being a cop. I tell my client's to not even respond to communications from any sort of law enforcement. Pass it to your lawyers. Let them first verify who and what authority is making the request. Do not leave such determinations to engineers and support staff.

Totally agree with everything here.

> I agree that it depends on who the law enforcement is.

All Law Enforcement is corrupt. The only unknown is the level of corruption. As a service provider in any country, we have no idea whether we will be dealing with a good cop or a bad cop, and the safest assumption to make is that they are all bad cops. Don't let the good cop set a precedent for interaction that the bad cop can abuse.

The system will work to abuse your trust. If the first warrant tou get is to help catch a pedophile who has been kidnapping children, and you sgree to provide logs for that, the Government will be upset when you don't comply with the next warrant which is a wife beating cop trying to track down his estranged wife who is due to appear in court tomorrow.

You have shown that you have the required data, the purpose of the warrant doesn't have any impact on the legal requirement to comply.

Or Obama trying to uncover who in the White House is talking to journalists.

Agree with first half, but second half is an appeal to authority, which is a fallacy. By not keeping logs, a VPN would take themselves out of a situation where corrupt authorities could exploit their power.

But they'd also take themselves out of a situation where non-corrupt authorities could use their power appropriately. You have to do the ethical math on the likelihood of either possibility and the consequences, which is subjective.

Don't advertise with "no logs" then.

The parent explicitly said that would be unethical, so you agree with them.

I completely agree, and said so in my original comment.

>But they'd also take themselves out of a situation where non-corrupt authorities could use their power appropriately.

Oh, well, if we're limiting the conversation to hypotheticals...

How about the idea that your bad behavior doesn't forfeit my right to privacy? I don't care if every other VPN user starts money laundry drug money by selling child porn - when it comes to my VPN logs, you can get lost, and I do nothing unusual or illegal. I have a very American attitude about personal freedoms and privacy.

I don't believe that every opportunity for data collection should be implemented just because an authority says it's for "the greater good".

> I don't care if every other VPN user starts money laundry drug money by selling child porn ...

If I require a valid warrant for a carefully scoped query, law enforcement would have to have probable cause, demonstrate that in a court, and get approval from a judge. Note the "carefully scoped" part: they can ask "who was using this IP address at this time to visit this site" but they don't get unlimited access to the logs data. The only way they would be able to get data about you is with probable cause that you are doing something illegal. Even if everyone else using that service is using it for illegal things, that does not constitute probable cause for them to get your data.

> I don't believe that every opportunity for data collection should be implemented just because an authority says it's for "the greater good".

I agree.

Logical fallacies are mistakes in logic. The appeal to authority fallacy is when you say something of the form "X is true because authority Y says so". I don't see how supporting warrants falls into that. What statement do you think is being fallaciously supported here, and which authority is being used to support it?

>I also think that explicitly not keeping logs to protect users from law enforcement is shady to say the least. If law enforcement has a valid warrant, I don't have an issue with providing them with the data they need to find and prosecute.

That statement. That because it's an authority they will be just, law abiding, and acting in everyone's best interest. That op has no problem with it because surely no one would ever abuse that power! That's a logical failure if you don't have your head in the sand.

But, I'm sure it makes no sense if you've been raised to believe the "government is here to help".

I said "valid warrant." If I found the warrant to be an over-reach, was on a flimsy pretext, or the request is not properly scoped I wouldn't consider that valid, and would appeal.

"Your appeal has been denied."

You're still considering a just and fair government/system, you've just moved the "just and fair" bit from "the police" to "the judge issuing the warrant". There are a fair number of people who have absolutely no trust in their (or any) government and consider the potential for government overreach. The best way to prevent government overreach is to make sure there is nothing they can reach for.

Some people have no issue with the government knowing their "harmless personal activities". While another group of some people believe the government has absolutely no right to know what's going on in their personal lives no matter how mundane.

I agree with everything you've said, but it's still not an "appeal to authority" argument.

For example: "You should vote Joe for Sheriff because my uncle--who is a private detective and knows these things--says to."

That said, logical fallacy discussions are irrelevant to your actual point: Keeping logs implies you trust the government entirely. Not keeping logs implies you trust your users entirely. Neither option is healthy for the other in and of themselves and requires "everyone else" (aka civilization) to be doing their jobs to stop bad guys and/or governments.

Tricky stuff.

His argument is literally "it's ok because they are an authority."

> Not keeping logs implies you trust your users entirely.

No. It means your business is to provide a proxy service, and not to monitor what users do with it. Trust has nothing to do with anything.

It's a special type of ignorance to say, "well, governments won't overreach, they're here to help" if you've been alive before and after 9/11.

I am inclined to agree, but this isn't an example of appeal to authority[1] it's just a willingness to believe in the status quo ("police should always be able to catch the bad guys, shouldn't they?").

1: https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla...

"I don't have an issue with obeying a valid warrant" does not imply that the government is always "just, law abiding, and acting in everyone's interest." I would strongly disagree with the latter while agreeing with the former.

It implies that either:

1) You're capable of discerning what is, or is not, a valid warrant, or

2) You trust the L.E. to do so for you.

Which?

These are not exhaustive options. The name of the logical fallacy you're committing here is a "false dilemma". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

I cannot discern what is or is not a valid warrant. That's why companies have lawyers. I don't trust law enforcement to do this either. That's why we have courts. There's a lot of room for nuanced opinions about our warrant system not being perfect but being better than nothing.

"You" implies your organization. You and your corporate attorneys are on the same team.

No logical fallacy, simply a strict reading of the words chosen.

Correction made, what's the third option, if those aren't exhaustive?

One other option is that I trust the courts. Another is that I don't trust law enforcement or the courts but I still think that an imperfect rule of law is better than not being able to have warrants at all. These things don't have to be absolute.

What’s unethical about not keeping logs? I explicitly don’t have external security cameras at my apartment: is it unethical because I can’t provide law enforcement with video in case something happens on my block?

I didn't say not keeping logs is unethical, I said " explicitly not keeping logs to protect users from law enforcement" is unethical. The difference is subtle. If you just happen to not keep logs that's fine, or if you don't keep logs because you don't want to have to pay for storing them or something that's also fine. But explicitly saying, "I could have logging here, but I don't want to because I don't want to provide evidence to law enforcement serving a valid warrant" is, in my view, unethical. Not tremendously unethical, mind you, but unethical. The morality is about the intent rather than the result.

I could have cameras, but I legitimately don’t want to provide footage to law enforcement. Am I now acting unethically? And what the difference if I simply don’t have them because I don’t want to spend money on them (or any other reason)?

This is not entirely a rhetorical device. I really don’t want to provide the government with a video feed of my neighborhood.

I'll start by saying that intent can matter a lot in ethics. Intent is the difference between a tragic accident and cold-blooded murder. I'll also add that I think your scenario is ethical, you don't have any obligation to put cameras around your house.

What's the difference between your scenario of a house with cameras vs. a VPN service not logging things? I'll be honest here, I could list out a bunch of differences between those two scenarios (houses tend to have a reasonable expectation of privacy while internet services may not, the likelihood of catching criminals and the severity of their crimes, the potential for abuse, in the case of your house you could always serve as a witness to a crime so cameras might be overkill, etc.) but I honestly don't know which one of those differences is the reason why I find one scenario to be ethical and the other unethical, or if it's some difference I haven't thought of (or I might be wrong!).

I'll admit my opinion here isn't fully fleshed out. Another thing is that I consider Tor to be ethical, even though that's essentially a VPN that doesn't log anything (from the perspective of not being able to respond to law enforcement requests, I know there are significant technical differences). In that case, I think the distinction is that Tor is meant to help fight censorship in authoritarian countries, and the fact that it can be used for nefarious purposes is an unfortunate side effect that doesn't outweigh the benefits.

Anyway, I do think there is a line between valuing the privacy of users and shielding them from legitimate law enforcement requests, but I'm open to discussion on where exactly that line falls.

You say that houses tend to have a reasonable expectation of privacy, but not internet services, why is that? Possibly because they keep their logs? I don't understand why we should not have reasonable expectation of privacy for our internet activity. Seems like we could have a reasonable expectation of privacy if internet services don't keep their logs. So intent might be there, but one could view their lack of logs as upholding our privacy, not hiding criminal activities.

I think your reading of my comment is confused: I would not be installing cameras in my house (where I have a reasonable expectation of privacy), but outside my house (where anyone can get a clear view of the entire block and what's happening there.

> I could have cameras, but I legitimately don’t want to provide footage to law enforcement.

You could have or you would have?

The logs are there, we usually have them, they don't cost much and they are pretty useful. Like his previous comment said, if you had never intended to have logs there or have reasons not to have logs (replace logs by camera in your situation), then there's nothing unethical about it.

As he said it's not the result but the intent that make it unethical. In the same situation, it could actually be ethical to not have logs, let say to allow people to communicate behind a corrupt government that want to silence them.

Do you market your house / front yard as a good place to do illegal things (even implicitly) and then take payment from the people doing them while turning a blind eye to whatever conduct is happening?

This presumes that law enforcement always represent the enforcement of ethically correct directives. This is demonstrably not the case, and categorically deferring to them is likely ethically irresponsible.

> I also think that explicitly not keeping logs to protect users from law enforcement is shady to say the least.

"Law enforcement" covers a variety of entities, from Mr. Friendly offering fatherly advice to fresh-scrubbed teens in Neverwas, IN to the people who brought us COINTELPRO and other folks throwing journalists out of windows in Russia.

I think it is more accurate to talk about "not keeping logs to protect users from entities who routinely traffic in violence" (among other things).

Ethics is hard.

Many people in the U.S. see nothing wrong with "logless access" as a way of avoiding law enforcement, when it is practiced in other countries whose law enforcement can -- including within the scope of their laws -- be quite abusive.

What makes you think your law enforcement is different?

And, with data potentially held in perpetuity, any past action may become grounds for prosecution, depending upon how law at the time of prosecution is defined.

People in the U.S. -- mainstream, as opposed to "minorities" -- have spent that past couple of decades waking up to the fact that laws and law enforcement are tools, not paragons of virtue. And those tools can be and are used for evil and harm.

This may not mean turning your back on the system -- nor even having the opportunity to. But it can mean being proactive to limit your exposure to potential abuse.

Not to mention all the commercial interests, who would love to have those logs. And, if your VPN company gets sold, including if it goes bust, all those logs become "assets" that will be monetized, regardless of any "promise" that was made. If there's enough value in them, lawyers will spend time and energy breaking any contractual obligations to same. And it's not like the company itself is around anymore to take the other side in such a dispute.

P.S. A bit of personal perspective: I've taken to using a VPN all the time -- as opposed to just while on public WiFi, like I once did -- to a) Keep Comcast out of my browsing, both their monitoring and their JS injection; b) Keep Verizon out of my mobile data use, again both monitoring and injection (that header they keep wanting to inject for tracking/advertising, among other things).

HTTPS is finally becoming widespread enough to prevent some of this, but that change has come years after the above abuses started. And it still doesn't mask domains, nor inappropriate GET's.

Good security isn't just reactive. It's pro-active. Another precept is to always provide minimal information to get the job done.

Anyway...

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