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Comment by billybob | Hacker News Reader

You're being too dismissive and you didn't read carefully. Their goal is to be unable to turn over information, and to that end, they say they'll discard the logs you refer to. So in theory, they won't have your cell phone location, what pages you visited, etc, or at least not for long. Your credit card is small potatoes by comparison; plenty of restaurants have that.

If they're also a telecom provider who can't comply with wiretaps, that's also huge.

Personally I think this is very exciting. Governments' game has been to make secret deals for surveillance; by announcing openly that they won't cooperate, this company will either succeed or may force the government to state openly the level of surveillance they demand. Citizens should know how out-of-control it's gotten.

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The importance of your credit card is that it links the account with you.

Unless they are going to spend a gazzilion $ putting their own cell towers across the country with their own backbone then their partner telcos have your location = so does the NSA.

And unless you are only emailing people/visiting sites in their system then the other telcos have the end points of those links. Calyx could hide the originator of these packets, but in that case they are no different from any other VPN - and I have a lot more security from PATRIOT (or MPAA) requests using a VPN owned by a Liberian company run from a rack in Estonia than I do with one run out of the USA. Ironically your best 'security' at the moment from US wiretaps is to use a VPN owned by the Chinese government.

You're saying that this isn't worth doing because they still have to keep some minimal amount of information about their customers in order to do business? You're saying everyday people should contract with a company in Liberia to route their traffic through Estonia?

That's ridiculous. The point of this is not make it easy to evade justice. Remember, we do want the police to be able to gather evidence against criminals when it's warranted. It's to prevent mass surveillance of the population by the state. Having communications companies that minimize the data they gather about their customers and refuse to hand it over to the state without a warrant is a huge step forward in protecting the civil liberties of ordinary citizens. That's the point.

The point is that the government has the ability with the cooperation of the telcos to track everything.

This telco is claiming that they have the technical means to prevent that - while in fact they have no technical difference (other than storing your email encrypted) than any other.

If all they are claiming is that they are good guys and wouldn't hand over your data if ordered then you have no more security than all the other telcos who also said that - either because they were lying or they were ordered to say so.

If your risk model is that the telco will cooperate with the US government then the solution is a telco who has no reason to do so.

This telco is claiming that they have the technical means to prevent that - while in fact they have no technical difference (other than storing your email encrypted) than any other.

That isn't my interpretation.

They seem to be saying that they will do everything technically and legally possible to prevent tracking.

That's a significant difference from the current situation where telcos hand over information whenever the government asks, even if not ordered to do so.

The point of this is not make it easy to evade justice. It's to prevent mass surveillance of the population by the state.

It's not clear to me that we can prevent mass surveillance without making it easier for criminals to evade justice.

I still think we should work to prevent mass surveillance, not because making things tough for law enforcement is not a problem, but because mass surveillance is a much bigger problem.

> The importance of your credit card is that it links the account with you.

What if you pay with a prepaid Visa/Mastercard, since those aren't linked to your name? Or in cash (yes, that still exists!), or via money order (since sending cash in the mail is illegal, and money orders can't be reliably linked to an individual).

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