America is not a stable ally, and has a history of spying on friends.
So unless the whole of your backup is encrypted offline, and you trust the NSA to never break the encryption you chose, its a national security risk.
> Bernard Squarcini, head of the Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur (DCRI) intelligence service until last year, told French daily Le Figaro he was “astonished” when Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said he was "deeply shocked" by the claims.
> “I am amazed by such disconcerting naiveté,” he said in the interview. “You’d almost think our politicians don’t bother to read the reports they get from the intelligence services.”
> “The French intelligence services know full well that all countries, whether or not they are allies in the fight against terrorism, spy on each other all the time,” he said.
> “The Americans spy on French commercial and industrial interests, and we do the same to them because it’s in the national interest to protect our companies.”
> “There was nothing of any real surprise in this report,” he added. “No one is fooled.”
I always thought it was a little unusual that the state of France owns over 25% of the defense and cyber security company Thales.
Unusual from an American perspective, maybe. The French state has stakes in many companies, particularly in critical markets that affect national sovereignty and security, such as defence or energy. There is a government agency to manage this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agence_des_participations_de_l... .
America is a shitty ally for many reasons. But spying on allies isn’t one of them. Allies spy on allies to verify they’re still allies. This has been done throughout history and is basic competency in statecraft.
No nation should trust the USA, especially not with their state secrets, if they can help it. Not that other countries are inherently more trustworthy, but the US is a known bad actor.
We also know this is also true for Russia, China and India. Being spied on is part of the cost of relying on external security guarantees.
> Not that other countries are inherently more trustworthy, but the US is a known bad actor
All regional and global powers are known bad actors. That said, Seoul is already in bed with Washington. Sending encrypted back-ups to an American company probably doesn't increase its threat cross section materially.
Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Georgia_Hyundai_plant_imm...
> The raid led to a diplomatic dispute between the United States and South Korea, with over 300 Koreans detained, and increased concerns about foreign companies investing in the United States.
That they are. Americans tend to view themselves as "the good guys" however, which is a wrong observation and thus needs pointing out in particular.
> That said, Seoul is already in bed with Washington. Sending encrypted back-ups to an American company probably doesn't increase its threat cross section materially.
If they have any secrets they attempt to keep even from Washington, they are contained in these backups. If that is the case, storing them (even encrypted) with an American company absolutely compromises security, even if there is no known threat vector at this time. The moment you give up control of your data, it will forever be subject to new threats discovered afterward. And that may just be something like observing the data volume after an event occurs that might give something away.
You really have no evidence to back up your assertion, because you’d have to be an insider.
Perhaps is doing a lot of work here. They do, and they are. That is what the Snowden leaks proved.
> You really have no evidence to back up your assertion, because you’d have to be an insider.
I don't, because the possibility alone warrants the additional caution.
The lack of a backdoor can be proven by choosing parameters according to straightforward reasons that do not allow the possibility for the chooser to insert a backdoor. The curve25519 parameters have good reasons why they are chosen. By contrast, Dual_EC_DRBG contains two random-looking numbers, which the NSA pinky-swears were completely random, but actually they generated them using a private key that only the NSA knows. Since the NSA got to choose any numbers to fit there, they could do that. When something is, like, "the greatest prime number less than 2^255" you can't just insert the public key of your private key into that slot because the chance the NSA can generate a private key whose public key just happens to match the greatest prime number less than 2^255 is zero. These are called "nothing up my sleeve numbers".
This doesn't prove the algorithm isn't just plain old weak, but nobody's been able to break it, either. Or find any reason why it would be breakable. Elliptic curves being unbreakable rests on the discrete logarithm of a random-looking permutation being impossible to efficiently solve, in a similar way to how RSA being unbreakable relies on nobody being able to efficiently factorize very big numbers. The best known algorithms for solving discrete logarithm require O(sqrt(n)) time, so you get half the bits of security as the length of the numbers involved; a 256-bit curve offers 128 bits of security, which is generally considered sufficient.
(Unlike RSA, you can't just arbitrarily increase the bit length but have to choose a completely new curve for each bit length, unfortunately. ed25519 will always be 255 bits, and if a different length is needed, it'll be similar but called something else. On the other hand, that makes it very easy to standardize.)
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It could well be that someone has been able to break it but that they or that organization did not publish.
I agree on the evidence/absence of conjecture. However, the impact of the secret feels impossible to keep.
Time will, of course, tell; it wouldn't be the first occasion where that has embarrassed me.
People who don’t know history think spying on allies is bad.