The Government Wants A Backdoor Into Your Online Communications

I disagree. Most are "backdoorable" because it is easier to build a service that way.

For instance consider gmail. The hard requirement is that a person armed with a user name and password can login from a browser and get access to that email. The common requirement is that a person armed with the right cookie can get that email. Now in theory you could encrypt all of the emails on the server, but now your operations costs went through the roof. However if you store them in plain text then you can use smart indexing, and your operations costs are much more manageable.

However once you've decided to have plain text files on your server, EVEN IF you aren't doing anything with them other than storing/sending them to the user, you're now able to backdoor those files, and hence can be compared to by a court.

There have been many email systems out there. Open source (qmail, sendmail, etc), proprietary (Exchange, Dovecot, etc), hosted in the cloud (Hotmail, Gmail, etc), hosted at your company (Exim, Oracle Communications Messaging Server, etc), built on top of platforms not meant to do email (Lotus Notes being a prime example) and so on.

Every single one of the ones I named and many, many, more stored data in plain text and legal discovery could be compelled on them. Simply because that was the easiest way to build them. There are exceptions, but they are exceptions because they were meant to be. Hushmail comes to mind. However even there, even when it was designed to store data in encrypted format, if the government can find a way to force you to extract data, they will push you to do so. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hushmail for a description of the way in which the government got Hushmail to capture plain text, even though the data was stored in plain text.)

The moral? Often the government has access not because evil profit-mongering corporations did wrong, but simply because obvious technical decisions leave them able to do so. And this can be true even when those corporations made a good faith effort to make that impossible.

And I hope it's clear I like and respect your questions -- people like you are the key reasons I keep coming back here.

About bitlocker, I agree with you that there likely isn't a backdoor built into the service beyond breaking crypto (likely still hard, though crypto export laws still apply and influence overall strength). What I would point out is that the data recovery 'backdoor' (where private keys get stored in central servers, either in AD or your Microsoft Account) is turned on by default. It's most likely for user convenience, but I imagine those that want ediscovery would be happy.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/bitlocker-recov...

What's worth remembering, though, is that such a proposal came reasonably close to becoming federal law in the 1990s. It was backed by the FBI and was approved by a House of Representatives committee, which I mention here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10024163-38.html

An excerpt from that article: "In the 1990s, [now-VP Joe] Biden was chairman of the Judiciary Committee and introduced a bill called the Comprehensive Counter-Terrorism Act, which the EFF says he was "persuaded" to do by the FBI. A second Biden bill was called the Violent Crime Control Act. Both were staunchly anti-encryption, with this identical language: It is the sense of Congress that providers of electronic communications services and manufacturers of electronic communications service equipment shall ensure that communications systems permit the government to obtain the plain text contents of voice, data, and other communications when appropriately authorized by law...

While neither of Biden's pair of bills became law, they did foreshadow the FBI's pro-wiretapping, anti-encryption legislative strategy that followed -- and demonstrated that the Delaware senator was willing to be a reliable ally of law enforcement on the topic. (They also previewed the FBI's legislative proposal later that decade for banning encryption products such as SSH or PGP without government backdoors, which was approved by one House of Representatives committee but never came to a vote in the Senate.)"

I am concerned about another scenario. I'm working on a site where people can exchange messages they've encrypted at the endpoints, such that the participants alone have the decryption ability and the server does not (assuming drawkbox is mistaken in some of his claims). Will it be illegal to launch this in the US if the requested law is passed first?

Sometimes in tax law, courts have held that because Congress was considering a bill, the taxpayer was on notice that something was going to be illegal, and then the taxpayer was unable to rely on it, even though it was legal when he did it. Besides, USG in recent years has proved to be unrestrained by legal barriers to anything it has demanded.

As a coauthor of the original post, I think the term is still reasonable and useful.

I agree that the applicability of "backdoor" to the cases you mention is less clear, and sometimes absent. Often, the main reasons that users don't get to control their own crypto keys may have to do with a service provider's business model and engineering decisions. If facilitating surveillance wasn't one of the main design goals, I can see where "backdoor" feels much less appropriate. (I think I'd argue that it's still an appropriate term if the architectural decisions about encryption are directly influenced by pressure from the government. Legislation to ban certain designs for communications systems should put us squarely in that category.)

I'd also like to find ways to encourage users to value end-to-end encryption, but I don't think that was meant to be the point of using the term "backdoor". We are actually talking about legislation here, supposedly meant to change how services are engineered, likely including services and software that are already in use.

Some papers on some techniques, even modes that make weaker key generation: http://www.cryptovirology.com/cryptovfiles/newbook.html

The last real non NSA approved system was PGP in early 1990's, look up Phil Zimmerman and understand that if you create a system that the NSA has trouble peering into if needed (sometimes with considerable processing power) you will be contacted.

http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=2316

"As the premier cryptographic government agency, the NSA has huge financial and computer resources and employs a host of cryptographers. Developments in cryptography achieved at the NSA are not made public; this secrecy has led to many rumors about the NSA's ability to break popular cryptosystems like DES (see Section 3.2), as well as rumors that the NSA has secretly placed weaknesses, called ``trapdoors,'' in government-endorsed cryptosystems. These rumors have never been proved or disproved. Also the criteria used by the NSA in selecting cryptography standards have never been made public."

There would never be definitive evidence and if so it would cause huge problems, for most communications including fast SSL/HTTPS exchanges for business or regular private communications this is not a worry. Most encryption is good enough for that level of communication, there is a reason though the military for sensitive information is using much greater levels and systems for crypto than consumer grade. Just don't be naive to think the NSA can't right now read all of your communications encrypted or not through many avenues trapdoors, backdoors in libraries, taking over computers to get private keys (all keys are stored somewhere and all passwords have to be typed in at some point) etc.

So logically, since we all know with unshakable certainty that the NSA has such capabilities, they must be suppressing and controlling the media.

There's a great line in "What Chinese Hackers Get Wrong About Washington:"

This is the most pervasive of of all Washington legends: that politicians in Washington are ceaselessly, ruthlessly, effectively scheming. That everything that happens fits into somebody’s plan. It doesn’t. Maybe it started out with a scheme, but soon enough everyone is, at best, reacting, and at worst, failing to react, and always, always they’re doing it with less information than they need.

That’s been a key lesson I’ve learned working as a reporter and political observer in Washington: No one can carry out complicated plans. All parties and groups are fractious and bumbling. But everyone always thinks everyone else is efficiently and ruthlessly implementing long-term schemes.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/02/25/w...