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Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

I'm always torn about this kind of exploit. On the one hand it's obviously vulnerable. On the other hand, securing it would require centralization of authority. I think I'm actually okay with accepting the tradeoff of insecure verification of "legitimacy," in exchange for decentralization of police power.

But it's also worth noting that the "vulnerable" system is not the centuries old system of policing. If you get arrested by a fake cop, that system affords you legal remedies - it might take a few days but you'll see justice. The vulnerable system here is Verizon's process for responding to inbound messages claiming to be search warrants. And when this system fails, the victim has effectively no remedy - their stalker already read the data that Verizon sent him.

So that's even less of a reason to increase centralization of the policing system. It won't solve the problem because the problem is with a different system.

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There's a solution for this, which is relatively easy to implement, if we dare to. Recognize data privacy as a right. Enable the victim to sue the leaking party, with easy recovery and costs, for any bad subpoena accepted, and pay substantial fine for violating the rights. Very heavily substantial if it leads to subsequent other damage (such as stalking or violence). Miraculously, the data hoarders would find ways to verify subpoenas (and design protocols and pay for development of necessary tools) very quickly, I think.

Of course, this would require such law to actually survive the lobbying block of the data hoarders in the first place, and that's not likely to happen, alas.

We need an embarrassing data leak on Congress before they will be motivated. They covered their asses quick when Bork's video rentals were publicized.

Even then they might likely just pass a law that makes it illegal to leak the data of a member of congress while leaving the rest of the American public screwed.

"This law covers anyone in Congress or having assets worth 20 million dollars or more"

every judiciary authorized to issue warrants should simply put them on their own website, put some id on the paper, folks can verify. what else is needed? these aren't supposed to be secret anyway

That's the least bad solution available IMO, since the Internet and DNS is the closest thing to decentralized we have available to us. But it requires a special TLD available exclusively to courts, which would make the TLD registry a centralized authority. What if a political activist refuses to validate the TLD of a court in the middle of Texas because of a disagreement with a ruling?

> But it requires a special TLD available exclusively to courts, which would make the TLD registry a centralized authority.

The .gov domain already exists: https://beta.get.gov/domains/before/

I believe warrants are frequently sealed (secret, at least temporarily) to prevent people from destroying evidence/fleeing...

Right, but I can imagine a system where you can enter a "subpoena ID" and it can tell you if it's valid and when it was issued, possibly even which jurisdiction.

That should be enough info where folks can verify the validity of their subpoena w/o revealing too much data. Including date of issuance and jurisdiction should help prevent using stale IDs to scare someone.

If the subpoena is not sealed, the ID would show all the subpoena info, further narrowing down the ability to replay stale IDs.

I'm definitely missing something obvious though because technical solutions are often not a panacea in cases like this

no, I don't there's anything missing, other than the usual apathy toward systems reforms in most societies.

this would probably work pretty well for these "utility-like big gatekeeper corps" which handle a shitton of subpoena requests, of course it doesn't help if a SWAT team is executing a someone-shout-and-knock-with-that-huge-doorfucker-implement on the wrong house.

in many countries there are state-managed online id systems allowing sending documents to legal persons ... which would make it really really trivial. send the warrant to the department executing it and to the department handling these at Verizon. (I wouldn't be surprised to learn that most of the US states already have something like this, but not used like this.)

it can be optional/voluntary for natural persons, it can be mandatory for companies above some size, etc.

Sorry who do you want having the right to subpoena these records besides the government?

There's more than one "government," that's what I mean by decentralization. There are thousands of courts throughout the country. I don't want some federal agency to be responsible for verifying the legitimacy of every warrant sent from every court.

How about having the federal government be responsible for publishing a list of public keys for each court jurisdiction?

That's what I was thinking... Why can't we solve this with non-repudiation crypto that is already available?

Does the court in each jurisdiction need to submit their public key for inclusion? Who in the federal government is responsible for verifying that a legitimate court submitted the key?

What if the head of the agency responsible for verifying these courts institutes a policy that courts will lose their verification for rulings against abortion?

What if two courts in neighboring jurisdictions claim to be the same court? They each submit a different public key, but both can verify they hold the private key that pairs with the public key they submitted. How does the federal agency even verify the identity of a courthouse? Do they need to physically visit them and meet with the judge to tap a Yubikey?

What if somebody steals the YubiKey from the judge? What if a referendum dissolves a jurisdiction?

What is the process for revocation of verification?

Most of the concerns you raised are either non-issues or can be resolved a minor amount of legal legwork. Even if the system isn't perfect and there are edge cases that it can't handle, having any sort of key registry is better than the current system where anyone can claim to be a judge, and it's up to some lowly corporate employee to do the verification themselves.

As a non American it's pretty comical watching Americans make mountains out of molehills for problems that are solved in other countries.

Which country has such systems?

A national id system, for one.

I've never looked into this specific issue but I would imagine that the Estonian e-Identity system has solved this specific problem among many others.

https://e-estonia.com/solutions/e-identity/id-card/

Why can't the police come to one of the Verizon stores in person and have a manager there verify by calling back the officially posted number of the department they are from?

> And when this system fails, the victim has effectively no remedy - their stalker already read the data that Verizon sent him.

Shouldn't the remedy be the guy goes to jail for a long time for forging a search warrant?

You're assuming the perpetrator can be identified, the US government gives a shit enough to pursue the matter (unless the victim is someone economically or politically elite, they won't), and the perp is somewhere our government can reach them in terms of extradition.

The most relevant example I can think of would be a CCP hacker forging a search warrant for a US-based political activist. The government would probably care, but good luck identifying some random Chinese Army hacker, much less extraditing them.

Cryptographic signatures exist. This is a trivial exploit to solve...

They could just come up with a standard hologram sticker that certifies all govt orders..

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