FBI's ability to legally access secure messaging app content and metadata [pdf]
propertyofthepeople.org
propertyofthepeople.org
We are not religious (at all). We do not attend church, synagogue or mosque. We are lower middle class white Americans born and raised in the USA and have never traveled outside the country.
I have no idea why they thought this about us. Maybe it was an IP mix-up, but it was very disturbing. I feared that I may lose my job. I became very afraid of the FBI that day. I think this could happen to anyone at anytime.
I understand that police/FBI have to conduct investigation. What dont understand is involvement of the employer , it's extremely disturbing - you have not been convincted, you have not been charged, you are not even a suspect or accused of anything at this point - how is your private life the business of your employer?
Why is your privacy being breached and livehood being placed at risk?
Surely the FBI is not allowed to publicise random dirt they find on innocent people?
If they're doing an investigation, they very likely got the employer involved in order to get more information on the person they're investigating, and companies have liaisons for law enforcement, as well. If the FBI comes knocking and says, "we think you've hired a terrorist," it's going to ruffle some feathers at the company no matter how unfounded or untruthful the claim is.
It isn't just the suspicion of terrorism that might have law enforcement or the FBI knocking at an employer's door. If someone is suspected of any type of cyber crime, the FBI will be coming for all of their computers and electronic devices, including the ones they use at work.
What is an employer going to contibute, realistically. "Oh yeah, he always carries potassium nitrate and makes explosions during lunch breaks!"
Thereby isolating the person during a period of high emotional anxiety.
The title may vary from place to place but all companies have people filling this role, even if you've never met them.
Normally falls somewhere under a team like Global Intelligence, Workplace Security, Business Continuity, etc.
I'm reading a book where the main character receives a subpoena to go to a interview with the Portugal dictatorship political police. Nothing happens to him (till now) but everybody in the hotel where he is hosted starts to treat him differently.
Who will be the first in the line when a firing is necessary? Probably the guy that has problems with the FBI.
From your further description:
> We are not religious (at all). We do not attend church, synagogue or mosque. We are lower middle class white Americans born and raised in the USA and have never traveled outside the country.
Would not the FBI have been able to any amount of background searching (read: further electronic information gathering), that would be less effort-intensive than getting arranging a 'threat assessment' coordinator from throw_away_dgs' actual workplace and a local police officer for an in-person door-knock. If such background checks were performed, then they either don't have much data or their threat weightings are set to red-scare levels of paranoia. Either way, it's scary.
Unless there's more to the story.
It used to be that if a teacher saw a kid get bullied and then punch his bully back, the teacher was empowered to evaluate the situation using their best judgement, and punish the bully while congratulating the bullied kid who stuck up for himself. The system sees a problem with that; the teacher's perception of the incident might have bias and prejudice. The system's solution is to have zero tolerance for any violence and punish both students equally. The system's solution to the possibility of prejudice against one student is to ensure prejudice against both students.
I mean that's not entirely wrong either. Bullying was still a thing before zero tolerance policies.
Not to say zero tolerance policies are the right solution, but personal bias _is_ a big problem when it comes to enforcement.
But the zero tolerance response to this circumstance ensures the bullied student is prejudiced against, judging him guilty before considering the facts of the individual circumstance. What does that teach the kid? That the system itself cannot be relied on.
Either their intel is better than they let on and didnt think they would be walking into an ambush or they are more stupid than we think.
If the FBI visited me and casually asked about my web history, I would casually ask them to pound sand (as should everyone!). But if the agent was accompanied with someone from my employer, I would eagerly cart up every single device in my home and offer to carry it out to their vehicle (as I fear most would).
It smells like someone is taking massive investigative shortcuts, at very significant cost to the accused. Then again, I can’t even fathom the upside for the FBI.
Or - you know - “weeeelp, I’ve been sitting at this desk all morning, let’s go talk to someone”.
The upside is power.
You yourself said as much: "If the agent was accompanied with someone from my employer, I would eagerly cart up every single device in my home and offer to carry it out to their vehicle."
You fear them. Rightly so. The FBI has incredible power, backed by the full might of corporate media. To cross them is to be crushed.
Why would they need a warrant, when Apple and Google climb over each other volunteer every scrap of your private information? Why take the time for a trial, when justice can more efficiently be served by both your employer and your union gleefully ruining you financially upon request?
People have been demanding[1] this for years. Now it's here.
They're not gonna have anything happen to them if they go tough on (and fuck over an) innocent guy.
They're gonna look bad if they miss a terrorist.
So they have no incentive to not have "red-scare levels of paranoia".
Now, visit a 'bad' website, or somehow be mistaken for someone that visited a 'bad' website, and you'll get some deep personal treatment.
Feds can't win, but it seems to be through their own laziness or incompetence or lack of interagency cooperation.
Or just going there out of intellectual curiosity, like how a leftie might read Main Kampf to check what that shit is.
You can end up in a very bad position...
The IRS proceeded to audit me (16 years old) and my $8k a year woodselling business I had with my dad. You tell me.
And on that note, why didn’t you sue your workplace for harassment? Whether you’re religious or not isn’t any of their business and is a protected class.
They didn't care what the consequences were for targeting someone innocent.
They also made nasty threats like "Someone has to go down for this, and if you help us collect intel on your industry peers we suspect then someone else can be that person"
I told them politely to go die in a fire because I was not about to help them harass other innocent people but it was terrifying none the less that they seemingly had the power to end my whole universe.
I became convinced through that ordeal that the FBI is a deeply corrupt organization that creates pressure to close cases by any means needed.
The OPs post seems totally believable and consistent with stories I have heard from others, particularly if they work for an organization that has the US government as a customer like a defense contractor.
The so called "justice" system, I guess.
I’m not surprised at all that the FBI is harassing people, I find it incredibly hard to believe a private business would touch the situation with a 4,000 foot pole. They have absolutely nothing to gain and massive liability.
Use Tor browser if you are going to research anything a criminal might regardless of pure motives.
If you so much as want to research lock picking, use Tor.
ISP traffic logs can and will be twisted against you in a court of law.
So "keyword" (could be a word, domain or some other pattern) X may trigger only if Y and Z was already triggered. And some keyword A may only trigger if B was NOT present.
This way you can distinguish doctors, reporters or people studying history or chemistry from those who plan something.
Or e.g. ML applied to patterns over time. Globally.
And yes I do not like it at all, HN is full of people that may likely research some kind of bomb, religion or whatever else out of pure curiosity, but since there are not many such people it can be problem in court one day.
Mix in some Snowden, your hardware stack, gag orders and the fact that we have more laws that anybody can read and you may feel like watching some stupid memes.
It's not prohibited but they notice and subject you to harassment by the system at every action with every part of the system that is integrated with their database.
Next day they might visit you to ask you why you are visiting an opposition party web site.
What was the reason for this? What type of workplace?
Build your own VPN https://github.com/hwdsl2/setup-ipsec-vpn
I am most curious why you believe that is a defense against radicalization. In the US that is perhaps the most common demographic for radicalization of any type.
OP apparently managed to clear up the mistake without much bother by speaking to them (although they were understandably shaken up by the experience). This presumably wouldn't have happened if they'd done what you suggest.
* Message content: All
* Subpoena: can render all message content for the last 1-7 years
* 18 U.S.C 2703(d): can render all message content for the last 1-7 years
* Search warrant: can render all message content for the last 1-7 years
* Vague suspicion plus a small fee to the carrier: can render all message content for the last 1-7 years
* Law enforcement simply asks nicely: can render all message content for the last 1-7 years
Yet, I'm pretty sure all these are still happening, to a certain degree, to this day.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nsa-spying-idUSKBN25T...
Recent cases:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkppqk/court-throws-out-mess...
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252503524/Berlin-court-f...
And then when they get caught, they do this:
It's funny how much this differs from my own personal experience with law enforcement. The friends I know are timid as hell and don't do anything without a warrant just to stay on the safe side- even if they probably don't need one.
An EO making it lawful for a federal agency to collect doesn't mean it is lawful for a private company to disclose, it doesn't change when a company is permitted to disclose the content of messages under the SCA
This was for a startup.
I have no doubt they do the same for governments.
Still. It meant a very powerful API key had to be protected and never abused.
I can only imagine others obtain God SMS access like this with less than ethical intentions.
Nobody should make decisions based on this comment.
It doesn't matter where your data is held, locally or cloud, (if you are an American resident and your data is in the USA) as it is _your_ data and it is unconstitutional for them to read it without a warrant. In theory.
In the US it does
This ruling has been adopted by the US Supreme Court: https://privacylaw.proskauer.com/2007/06/articles/electronic...
https://www.nbcnews.com/technolog/how-long-do-wireless-carri...
Not counting media and assuming they are all 160 byte messages, that's 4 terabytes per day, or about 200 wikipedia's per day. I guess that's not too bad in terms of storage requirements, certainly a management amount of data for a telecom to store. But assuming that you want those indexed and easily retrievable somehow, it could get very burdensome to manage and interact with, and that tends to balloon the size at least a little bit as well.
The liability and legal issues around it (both externally and internally - don't want employees spying on their exes, leaking data from celebs, in addition to the policing issues, etc) makes it pretty undesirable to store though.
All of these projects are more properly grouped with government funding in other spheres, such as the BBC or PBS in media, than they are with the surveillance state or the NSA. Levine overlooks basic details, such as reproducible builds, that quickly collapse the house of cards that is his narrative. He tries to paint them all with the NSA brush, when, in fact, they’re simply projects that have historically received some of their funding from the government while fulfilling missions with extraordinary humanitarian benefits. Levine’s own knowledge and experience in this area is shallow. Look elsewhere.
> would be more fully saturated with corporate control of the internet
You might disagree. His point was that the "corporate controllers of the internet" support projects like Tor because A) it gives a (somewhat ineffective) channel for people to focus on rather than political recourses and B) there's no real threat to the corporate model. What would you do in this e2e encrypted internet without corporate services?
> such as reproducible builds
Seems like a tangential point. You can have an untampered copy of a client with a vulnerability.
> funding from the government while fulfilling missions with extraordinary humanitarian benefits
I don't think this is in disagreement with anything either
Ahh yes, the famed operation Condor, operation Gladio, operation iceberg and so many other famed "humanitarian" projects
At the end of the day all that you mentioned goes back to a post-facto "it is good because *we* do it", I would go to say that most people here in HN are well aware of the start of Google when it was funded by us Intel as a way to parse Vietnam era datasets, or how US Intel uses Radio Free Asia to destabilize enemy countries abroad, but again, it is only good/not bad when "*we"* do it
Apologies for a rather low quality comment, but these types of persons handwaving the actual structure behind all of this really get on my nerves, specially when I have had family members be tortured as a consequence of these US activities
This is in fact a distinct reason CIA/NSA (and vice versa) won't accept recruits who have served in the peace corp previously, amongst other reasons.
> Without them, we’d basically be left with Wikipedia as the only popular entity on the internet outside of corporate control.
Wikipedia is absolutely not "outside of corporate control". It is trivially astroturfed to advance special interests.
> All of these projects are more properly grouped with government funding in other spheres, such as the BBC or PBS in media
Both BBC and PBS routinely publish outright disinformation to advance the special interests of their corporate/government clients, including the intelligence community. For example, look at PBS Frontline's ridiculous puff piece for the violent extremist group HTS last year.
> Levine overlooks basic details, such as reproducible builds
Reproducible builds are also easily circumvented by selectively deploying backdoors and other malware, based on IP or other fingerprints.
If there are good reasons to dispute Levine's investigative journalism, they're not here.
I’m not claiming PBS and the BBC are perfect entities, but they do offer an alternative source of information that runs against the grain of corporate media. You would prefer…what exactly?
Brilliant reposte, but I am curious what software are you referring to here?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20824759#20826587You should be extremely skeptical about people who bring OTF/BBG up in these discussions. I have complicated feelings about Tor stemming mostly from culture and effectiveness concerns and would push back on claims that it's co-opted by the Navy or corporate interests, but at least I can see a clear (if silly) line connecting Tor to these supposed conflicts of interest.
Correct, it is not funded by "the military", but this is incorrect
> any branch of the USG government
Because Signal/TextSecure received considerable amounts of seed capital from Radio Free Asia which is a CIA spinoff with the explicit aim to fund the development of the cryptography at grass roots level, not per se to have full control of it like NSA would have done, but because having strong cryptography on such platforms (Telegram might be other) is highly effective against perceived US enemies like well... Iran, or Syria, and to allow their assets/agents to communicate more easily while abroad without bulky extra proprietary phones or software
All of that above is mentioned at length on Surveillance Valley btw
Which also unfortunately points to them having exploits no one has discovered yet in said technology tools.
They can still maintain generalized situational control via additional superiority vectors(MASINT, HUMINT, GEOINT, OSINT, FININT etc.)
That's how Ulbricht sometimes spelled hey, and the agent had seen that particular spelling before in his investigation, in an email from Ulbrict’s student email address.
Nick Bilton's book “American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road” is a great read, highly recommended.
much more likely -- sigint tooling was applied to identify ulbricht, bulk metadata was turned over for his comms history, and it was pored over for things they could connect with sr to get warrants. imo, at least.
but getting to claim you're such a sharp investigator that you can figure it out by noticing the word heyy makes for a much better story to tell an author.
No one tries to take notice since they're hosting the worst content on the internet regularly.
Are those "facts" avaiable for investigating, without having to buy the book?
(that Tor is partly US administration funded is known, but Signal? And what is OTF and BGG?)
Funded by Open Technology Fund (OTF) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Technology_Fund
Which is funded by Radio Free Asia (RFA) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Asia. It had a few reboots but was created as a CIA program in 1951 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Asia_(Committee_for...) to blast shortwaves into China from Manilla to try to overthrow the Chinese government. Rebooted more recently since the advent of the great firewall of China.
The main tool, used for private communication?
And Whatsapp will give them the target's full contactbook (was to be expected), but also everyone that has the target in their contact list. That last one is quite far reaching.
Most people don't realize that most people have something to hide. The USA has so many laws on its books. Many of which are outright bizarre[0] and some of which normal people might normally break[1].
And that's only counting current/past laws. It wasn't that long ago a US President was suggesting all Muslims should be forced to carry special IDs[2]. If you have a documented history being a Muslim, it could be harder to fight a non-compliance charge.
[0] https://www.quora.com/Why-is-there-a-law-where-you-can-t-put...
[1] https://unusualkentucky.blogspot.com/2008/05/weird-kentucky-...
[2] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-muslims-id/
Barratry. If a person wickedly and willfully excites and stirs up actions or quarrels between the people of this State with a view to promote strife and contention, he or she is guilty of the petty offense of common barratry[.]
https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/ilcs4.asp?DocName=0720...
EDIT: Ultimately, the nuance in that history is not relevant to the point that criminal law changes to include new categories in unexpected ways.
> “We’re going to have to look at a lot of things very closely,” Trump continued. “We’re going to have to look at the mosques. We’re going to have to look very, very carefully.”
That's all he said to the interviewer. The interviewer was asking the hypothetical and suggested the special identification! He wouldn't take the bait, so since he didn't answer the hypothetical they said "he wouldn't deny it" and wrote the campaign of hit piece articles anyway. Whatever response they got they would have wrote that same piece. If he would have answered one way they would have quoted out of context. Since he responded generically it's obviously drummed up. The fact check is hilarious. "Mixed", lol.
Never answer a hypothetical, it's always a trap.
And then the next day, he clarified:
Reporter: "Should there be a database or system that tracks Muslims in this country?"
Trump: "There should be a lot of systems, beyond databases. I mean, we should have a lot of systems."
And then he tried to backpedal. Decided it was a watch list, not a database, etc. Basically the usual shtick of his where he tries to say everything and nothing at the same time.
> There should be a lot of systems, beyond databases. I mean, we should have a lot of systems
Beyond databases. What does that mean? That could be analog systems, that could be anything not stored in a computer.
Nothing to do with identification which would need a database. It's a generic answer to avoid a hypothetical. It's a nonanswer.
He said nothing, not everything. You are attributing the reporters question to him. The reporter is posing the hypothetical that they created in the first place by the initial interview.
My main point was hypotheticals are always trap (unless among friends!), but that's a great example of an obvious one.
The usual shtick is to say nothing, because the journalistic usual shtick is to ask gotcha hypotheticals.
> "We’re going to have to look at the mosques. We’re going to have to look very, very carefully."
I already do not trust the person who has said that. Does it really matter if he proposed a full-fledged ID system? He still proposed monitoring mosques. He still proposed surveillance based on religious identity.
The correct answer to that question, "should Muslims be subject to special scrutiny" is a simple "no". I don't really get the debate about hypotheticals; this a question that does have a straightforward, right answer. And the implications here in regards to surveillance and ordinary people having stuff to hide -- those implications are all the same regardless of whether or not Trump actually proposed a literal database.
He was open to increased surveillance on Americans based on their religious identity, he didn't immediately shut the idea down.
> On each of your devices, the data that you store in iCloud and that's associated with your Apple ID is protected with a key derived from information unique to that device, combined with your device passcode which only you know. No one else, not even Apple, can access end-to-end encrypted information.
HN tends to get very frothy-at-the-mouth over Apple and privacy but the reality is that iPhones can be easily set up to offer security and privacy that best in class, they play well with self-hosted sync services like Nextcloud....and unlike the Android-based "privacy" distros you're not running an OS made by a bunch of random nameless people, you can use banking apps, etc.
The only feature I miss is being able to control background data usage like Android does.
Either way looks like Signal wins by a lot. The size of it spot is so small, it seems almost squeezed in. But only because they have nothing to share.
as a casual reminder: The fifth amendment protects your speech, not your biometrics. do not use face or fingerprint to secure your phone. use a strong passphrase, and if in doubt, power down the phone (android) as this offers the greatest protection against offline bruteforce and sidechannel attacks used currently to exploit running processes in the phone.
- Use a strong pass phrase
- Enable biometrics so you don’t need to type that pass phrase 100 times per day
- Learn the shortcut to have your phone disable biometrics and require the pass phrase so you can use it when police is coming for you, you’re entering the immigration line in the airport etc. - on iPhone this is mashing the side button 5 times
I liked it in Wrath of Man where one guy is acting tough as fuck until they bring his girl into the room.
Also, if you can, if you are encrypting data, use a hidden volume inside the first - that way you can give the government the outer password and they'll be happy thinking they have everything.
but can't they force you to put your password in that case, instead of your finger?
Lots of FUD out there there about Telegram not being encrypted that's just not true. There's nothing either side can to do send a message in clear text / unencrypted.
This is proven by an extremely simple experiment: you log in on your new phone, enter password and instantly see all chats.
Another simple experiment points that chats are unlikely to be even encrypted at rest is that Telegram has an extremely fast server side message search. You log into a web client, half a second later you can type a search query and uncover chats from years ago.
What this means is that any conversations where you do select E2EE are the ones the "authorities" will take interest in, even if only to the extent of metadata.
That's the fundamental problem with E2EE-by-exception, rather than by default. It calls attention to specific data, even if its not cleartext, rather than obscuring everything.
also curious - how does telegram support encryption for chatrooms without the parties being known in advance? or are those chats not encrypted?
Maybe there are laws preventing legal access to message content? Maybe related to wherever Telegram is incorporated.
Well sure. A lot of laws require a court order. In the U.S. that's usually not too difficult.
I assume what they're showing for Telegram (basically no data except IP/phone data if Telegram decides it's for a legit counter-terrorism activity) is a matter of Telegram business policy.
Signal gives the limited information they do because I assume they are subject to warrants from U.S. courts. Telegram is run, to my understanding, from jurisdictions where enforcing a U.S. court order would be difficult-to-impossible, and they keep the private keys to decrypt their stored message content split between servers in relatively non-overlapping legal jurisdictions, so even a successful seizure of data in one wouldn't be enough to decrypt message content.
That's all well and good -- and I appreciate Telegram for setting things up that way -- but that means at any time Telegram could make a policy decision to cooperate with law enforcement and provide much more than what is shown on this chart. Signal, on the other hand, could choose to cooperate as much as they want but not have the technical capability to provide more information. (Barring them updating their client to intentionally build in a backdoor, etc., but I'm basing this on what the current implementation is.)
The other important thing about this chart: this is the unclassified version. Is there another classified document out there which says "we have a secret relationship with Telegram/whomever and they give us all the message content we want" but they don't advertise to the law enforcement community at large? They secretly use it to aid in parallel construction so they don't ever have to reveal that a messaging vendor is giving them message content in court? We have no idea.
tl;dr: Telegram looks great on this chart because of policy, not technology. I love Telegram, but I'm under no illusions that it's appropriate for talking about things I wouldn't want law enforcement to have access to. Luckily, I haven't found myself needing to talk to my friends about illegal activity.
This is what puzzles me about Apple, they absolutely have the capability to mitm iMessage pretty discreetly. Because Apple just completely hand waves away key distribution and they can silently add and remove keys at their leisure it's largely only policy that underpins their security. They're not Telegram, they aren't structured to be in a position to be able to ignore demands from the justice system to assist with some agent's latest fishing expidition. How are they getting away with not providing stuff that they obviously have access to? The PDF lists "Pen Register: no capability"
My bet is on the fact that they are based in Russia, so they don’t give a shit about a US warrant or subpoena.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-12/cryptic-r... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_Telegram_in_Russia
https://telegram.org/privacy#3-3-1-cloud-chats https://telegram.org/faq#q-do-you-process-data-requests
Add to this the fact that WhatsApp
- uploads messages unencrypted to Google if you or someone you chat with enable backups
- and send all your metadata to Facebook.
Then remember how many people here have tried to tell us that Telegram is unusable abd WhatsApp is the bees knees.
Then think twice before taking security advice from such people again.
PS: as usual, if your life depends on it I recommend using Signal, and also being generally careful. For post card messaging use whatever makes you happy (except WhatsApp ;-)
The only reason Telegram comes out on top of Whatsapp in the document in question is because Telegram is a foreign company with little interest in cooperating with a US domestic police agency; the FBI has no leverage over Russian companies.
What that list doesn't show is what Telegram does when the FSB knocks. By all means, give your potentially embarassing message content to a hostile nation's intelligence service.
This is plain false as can be verified by anyone who can check Telegram GitHub repos or run the app in a debugging environment.
Telegram defaults to point-to-point encryption. Same as banks and gmail.
Fun fact: back in the days WhatsApp sent messages unencrypted (i.e. as plain text) over port 443(!).
> does not do encrypted group chats,
again, point-to-point encryption
> has a home-rolled encryption protocol which almost guarantees it's weak as nearly every home-rolled encryption system always is (if not also backdoored).
Earlier versions had serious problems. Newer versions are supposedly better.
Also there is a lot of difference between home-grown cryptography by a math wizard, made open source for everyone to inspect and various secret sauce variants.
HN has a long history of claiming it can be trivially broken, yet despite source code being available no one has done it? Lazyness or incompetence? Or maybe it isn't so simple?
I don't know but if you want to shut me up and make your claim to fame: do break Telegram cryptography. You'll do the world a service both by exposing it and by shutting up people like me.
Meanwhile, stop spreading lies. Telegram is not unencrypted. It is point-to-point encrypted by default.
If the encryption is weak, prove it or shut up.
I stand by my assertion that Telegram's proprietary secret encryption is nearly guaranteed to be weaker than industry-standard encryption. "Home grown is always weaker" is a well known position of almost the entire crypto community.
I further stand by my assertion that Telegram's encryption is nearly guaranteed to be backdoored, because there is literally zero reason for a startup to invest the massive engineering resources needed to successfully develop and maintain its own encryption algorithms, unless they were being paid to do so.
The NSA has a long history of backdooring private encryption technology through industry "partnerships."
Do you seriously think Putin would allow a domestic company to develop a communication tool that would allow Russians to communicate with each other in complete privacy?
> prove it or shut up.
Go read the HN commenting policy (specifically around civility) or shut up.
So you admit you weren't just spreading inaccuracies you heard from someone else but you knew you were posting disinformation.
> I further stand by my assertion that Telegram's encryption is nearly guaranteed to be backdoored, because there is literally zero reason for a startup to invest the massive engineering resources needed to successfully develop and maintain its own encryption algorithms, unless they were being paid to do so.
This is a good argument.
> Do you seriously think Putin would allow a domestic company to develop a communication tool that would allow Russians to communicate with each other in complete privacy?
Telegram is not a Russian company?
>> prove it or shut up.
> Go read the HN commenting policy (specifically around civility) or shut up.
Sorry. I was too harsh. I actually regret.
Compared to willfully spreading disinformation however it seems pretty minor though?
-----
A bit more: I know local police used to use Telegram. That worries me.
It is actually even more complicated:
If Putin reads my most personal messages I don't care.
If NSA or even worse, local police actually took their time to read my messages I'd be mad or worried.
However if FSB asked for help they would need a very good reason and I'd try to consult with local law enforcement first.
If local police however asked for help I'd go out of my way to help them.
> What that list doesn't show is what Telegram does when the FSB knocks. By all means, give your potentially embarassing message content to a hostile nation's intelligence service.
Telegram is in a lot of trouble in operating in Russia. It was blocked for two years. [1]
If they are so co-operative, why pass the opportunity to watch on their own people. Or did they become co-operative after unblock? It seems, that they help on some level [2], but does this threaten to other countries? Hard to say so.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_Telegram_in_Russia
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/telegram-rus...
It was never removed from national appstores, and Google/Apple usually comply with such requests, and the fact that it was unbanned is unprecedented.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/after-almost-2-months-apple-stops...
> This electronic communication has been processed by the United
> States National Security Agency.
You don’t get to pick your jurisdiction and then operate globally. You’re obligated to follow the laws where you want to operate.
- block the company nationwide, see Huawei (also includes ceasing contracts with app stores, both of which are American)
- block access to your website, see TPB
- harass you when you travel, either to the US or fellow countries.
For WhatsApp:
> if target is using an iPhone and iCloud backups enabled, iCloud returns may contain WhatsApp data, to include message content
Probably not true since WhatsApp launched encrypted backups.
If WhatsApp does not encrypt its content at rest locally, then “iCloud backups” still contain everything unencrypted too.
Instead of rambling on and on about "end to end encryption" or "double-ratchet cryptographic algorithms" or other junk only nerds care about, approach it like this:
* There are no ads, and none of the messages you send can be used for advertising
* It's not owned by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or any of the other mega-corporations, and you don't need an account on one of their sites to use it
* It will still work great if you travel, change providers, etc
* It's much safer to use on public Wi-Fi than other services or SMS
Honestly, don't even touch on law enforcement access as in the OP. That can strike a nerve for some people. The best appeals are the simple ones.
I think the common mistake is trying to convince people with the security. Use that as a bonus, not the main feature. You're talking geek to people that don't speak geek (convince geeks with these arguments, not mom and dad). I also suggest strong arming people and using momentum (if 4 people in a group of 5 have Signal, switch the group to Signal. Or respond to WA messages on Signal).
As far as I can tell, nothing really happened afterwards. I use Signal on a daily basis and haven't noticed any coin-related functionalities. Either they were canceled, haven't been released yet or they're just buried somewhere deep and not advertised.
Do you have a different experience?
It's still a pain to buy MOB in the US so it's not that usable in the states. It would have been interesting to me if they just used Zcash instead of rolling their own, but I'm not sure what's supposed to be special about MOB vs. Zcash.
I also don't think it's that big of a deal.
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360057625692-In...
The day facebook went down for some hours I got phone calls.
But most of my American friends that don't have international contacts still just use SMS because they are not really accustomed to an app such as WhatsApp and so on.
An active investigation leads an agent to a suspect known to have used one of these applications
An administrative subpoena is issued to the company asking for what information is available
The company is then ordered by a federal judge to provide information related to a particular account or accounts
The company complies.
This is why it is important to understand how your messaging service handles data and how you can compromise your own safekeeping of all or part of that data.
Briar was another one.
Knowing how well guarded IOS is against app developers, I wonder what kind of zero-day would suddenly turn a message received in WhatsApp to full system access. I think NSO found a WhatsApp backdoor, not a zero-day bug.
I don't know any detail of the whatsapp vulnerability that NSO exploited.
At the risk of being cliche here's a relevant xkcd - https://xkcd.com/538/
[1]https://engineering.linecorp.com/en/blog/new-generation-of-s...
You simply want it to be cost prohibitive to engage in mass surveillance on everyone, because that is an immensely powerful tool of totalitarian oppression that get really bad if we happen to elect the wrong person once.
or are there no messaging systems with a name before 'i'
Telegram. -> KGB
Signal. -> The rest of us?
https://propertyofthepeople.org/document-detail/?doc-id=2111...
Here's a direct link to the PDF: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/21114562/jan-2021...
Thank you Signal team for focusing so hard on the user experience.
The US has a balanced criminal justice system -- as long as due process is preserved privacy from the state should not be a major issue
Just look at the transparency reports of major Internet companies; they can report numbers of (certain types of) requests and that's about it. Mass surveillance under seal is not a great trend.
When political parties start advocating for jailing political opponents and treating the supreme court as political office for nominations, I find it harder to trust the current due process.
Really, we shouldn't do anything; we have the bigger problem of the eventual heat death of the universe.
Take into account not only the size of the problem, but how easy it is to do something about it.
If it’s not in your physical possession, it’s not your computer. If it’s not your computer, then whoever administers the computer, or whoever [points a gun at/gives enough money to] the administrator of that system can access whatever you put on that system.
If a “cloud” or “service” is involved, then you can trivially use them to move or store data that you encrypted locally on your computer with your key that was generated and stored locally and never left your system. But subject to the limits above, the administrators of the other computers will still be able to see metadata like where the data came from and is going to. And they might be able to see your data too if you ever (even once, ask Ross Ulbrecht) failed to follow the basic encryption guidelines above.
You can make metadata access harder via VPNs and Tor, but you CANNOT make it impossible- in the worst case, maybe your adversary is controlling all the Tor nodes and has compromised the software.
Which leads me to my last point, if you did not write (or at least read) the code that you’re using to do all of the above, then you’re at the mercy of whoever wrote it.
And, if you try to follow perfect operational security, you will have a stressful and unpleasant life, as it’s really really hard.
It's worse than that. Even if you read the code, you have to trust that the code you read is the code a service is actually using. Even if you deploy the code yourself, you have to trust that the infrastructure you're running on does not have some type of backdoor. Even if you run your own infrastructure, hardware can still have backdoors. Of course, the likelihood of any of these things actually becoming a problem decreases significantly as you read through the paragraph.
And yet, "likelihood" doesn't necessarily mean "hasn't been done".
Just look at:
* [0]: Intel ME
* [1]: Solarwinds attack and CI systems
* [2]: Ubiquiti attack and complete infrastructure compromise
* [3]: And the famous Ken Thompson statement
[0a]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15298833
[0b]: https://www.blackhat.com/eu-17/briefings/schedule/#how-to-ha...
[1]: https://www.cisecurity.org/solarwinds/
[2]: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/04/ubiquiti-all-but-confirm...
[3]: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-tho...
Don't forget to verify the code for the compiler to ensure that hasn't been compromised in order to inject an exploit into the binary at compile time.
https://www.amd.com/en/processors/epyc-confidential-computin...
And this tech is already implemented by GCP:
https://cloud.google.com/confidential-computing
> With the confidential execution environments provided by Confidential VM and AMD SEV, Google Cloud keeps customers' sensitive code and other data encrypted in memory during processing. Google does not have access to the encryption keys. In addition, Confidential VM can help alleviate concerns about risk related to either dependency on Google infrastructure or Google insiders' access to customer data in the clear.
You also have to trust that AMD generated and have always managed the encryption keys for that system properly and in accordance with their documentation.
And are you even sure that you’re actually running on an AMD system? If the system is in the cloud, then it’s hard to be sure what is executing your code.
And are you sure that your code didn’t accidentally break the security guarantees of the underlying system?
I have worked on all these problems in my day job, working on HSMs. At the end of the day there are still some leaps of faith.
You'd also need to consider AMD's management engine, the Platform Security Processor. If we're really slinging conspiracy theories, AMD processors are likely just as backdoored as Intel one. I don't mean to be grim, but I think it's safe to assume that the US government has direct memory access to the vast majority of computer processors you can buy these days.
[/conspiracy]