I have absolutely no reason to think Cloudflare is a covert CIA operation. In fact, I’m sure there are plenty of good reasons to think it isn’t. But if it were, pretty much everything it does is exactly what you'd expect from one.
Five years later Mr Prince was doing a Master of Business Administration (MBA) at Harvard Business School, and the project was far from his mind, when he got an unexpected phone call from the US Department of Homeland Security asking him about the information he had gathered on attacks.
Mr Prince recalls: "They said 'do you have any idea how valuable the data you have is? Is there any way you would sell us that data?'.
NSA's mission, as outlined in Executive Order 12333 in 1981, is to collect information that constitutes "foreign intelligence or counterintelligence" while not "acquiring information concerning the domestic activities of United States persons".
Whether they abide by that is another matter.
Also the NSA is a "signals intelligence" agency... Wouldn't the FBI be the local analog to the CIA? Or maybe the DHS?
Another thing is the motivation to send people to work for CF. And another thing is the question of preparation vs hope.
Are you, by chance, an operative, sir? :)
How is anyone worse off using their OHTTP gateway than not using it? Is the idea that CF is this spectacular conspiracy, but nobody thought of capturing traffic from backbones?
When you capture traffic at internet backbones, which the NSA does (Room 641A), you don't get to middle-man the encrypted traffic. Cloudflare gets access to unencrypted traffic, because they act as the TLS termination.
Most companies take this trade-off because "we can trust cloudflare", or "the data isn't that important, and besides it's encrypted the rest of the way anyway."
How is that exactly what you would expert from a covert government operation?
Do we agree that the design goes through two hops, only one of which is controlled by Cloudflare? And that it is the whole point of the design?
Yeah I'm not sure what everyone's complaining about. The lack of criticism of anything specific about OHTTP makes me think it's just kneejerk "cloudflare = bad".
I mean, sure. There is that against BigTech all the time, and I understand where it comes from.
What I don't get is that... I don't know, I feel like it should be possible to be against the fact that there are monopolies and criticise them on the one hand, and on the other hand to actually have technical discussions about technical solutions. Here it feels like many comments denigrate Cloudflare without even understanding what the OHTTP gateway does.
For example:
- "Google sucks, they just optimise for profit like all BigTech and that makes it worse for everybody" -> criticises a monopolist entity, all good. No need to be constructive here, it's just sharing a feeling.
- "Android's security model is soooo bad because Android is developed by Google, you should use Linux on mobile it's a lot more secure" -> criticises a technical solution (Android's security model) in a completely uninformed manner, not good.
In other words, BigTech companies "suck" by being BigTech companies, but they do hire brilliant engineers and develop nice stuff (when they don't develop technology to screw us, that is), and I think it would be worth acknowledging that. Cloudflare does contribute a lot of cool stuff open source. One doesn't have to like that Cloudflare is as big as it is, but that's not a reason to say that what they open source is bad software.