OpenADP, needs volunteers to help prevent mass secret surveillance | Hacker News Reader

OpenADP, needs volunteers to help prevent mass secret surveillance

openadp.org

17 pointsWaywardGeek4 comments

As you all know, the UK tried to force Apple to give them a secret mass surveillance capability, not just for UK citizens, but Apple users globally. As a result, Apple disabled "Advanced Data Protection" in the UK.

OpenADP is Open source Advanced Data Protection for everyone. It defends vs secret mass surveillance via software transparency and distributed trust. That distributed trust is built through OpenADP servers run by volunteers around the world.

OpenADP has servers in the US, but for resistance to any one government, volunteers in several countries are needed. There is a quick-start guide for running OpenADP on a Raspberry PI. If you've got a Raspberry PI to spare, and some free time, consider volunteering for OpenADP.

(This is a bit of a continuation of what `whiteandnerdy` posted in a different comment) - the distributed trust model seems to assume that the governments won't cooperate to seize different necessary distributed things across borders. I am reasonably sure that this is not an assumption which holds true - plenty of multi-national raids on criminals happen (and classifying people who hold decryption bits to stuff governments want as being criminals is a fairly trivial task).

Good on you for seeing a problem and making something to solve it!

That said, I'm a bit confused about the use case. Wouldn't it be simpler and more secure to have all the encryption occur on the client side, and have the server be a dumb encrypted blob store?

Put another way, I think OpenADP tries to solve the problem "I don't trust hosting providers in any single sovereign nation" by splitting the trust between multiple nations; whereas it seems like it would be even better not to trust any of them.

Ghost Notes has a couple of bugs.

First off, sometimes it shows the wrong number of attempts you still have (sometimes it shows 10 when it really is 5, sometimes it shows 0 when it really is 5 or 4 or just simply >0).

Secondly, the PIN provided does not always work, I used 1234 and decryption seemed unsuccessful. I set it up again and it worked.

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