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Comment by annnnd | Hacker News Reader

If NSA could subpoena Google, they can (and probably do) do the same with DDG.

Not that I don't wish them success, but PRISM is not the right reason to switch search engine to them.

DDG logs very litte information...so while NSA can subpoena DDG, there's no data to get.

Developers should read "Playing chicken with cat.jpg" [1] which was a response from cperciva [2] to the 37 Signals privacy blunder. It was discussed quite a bit on HN [3] and for me it was a perspective-changing read on privacy.

[1] http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-01-19-playing-chicken-w...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cperciva

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3484284

Why bother asking DDG itself when traffic can be intercepted and logged at their ISP?

That's why you should https everywhere.

https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

IIRC HTTPS would encrypt your data from your ISP.

Until PRISM subpoenas DDG and gets their private keys -- after which they can decrypt the SSL traffic.

Not necessarily possible even with the private keys. If you use an SSL cipher with ephemeral keys, such as the DHE_* or ECDHE_* family of ciphers, then an eavesdropper with a recorded but not MITMed conversation cannot decrypt it even with the server's private SSL key.

See http://vincent.bernat.im/en/blog/2011-ssl-perfect-forward-se... for example.

Which of course they do not. Google uses ECDHE_RSA. DDG uses RSA. ixquick, "the world's most private search engine", uses RSA. Bing does not even offer https.

Google does pin their keys in Chrome though, so they know if there is a MITM (and they have, Chrome's certificate pinning led to DigiNotar's downfall). It's a non-scalable hack, but definitely a good one for the largest search engine and a leading email provider to be able to provide.

What's preventing the government from coercing DDG to start log collections at their end, and then sealing it with a gag order?

Your ISP probably has these installed on every one of their racks:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/packet-forensics/

Don't forget link owners. NSA and other bastards can force data centers and link providers without knowledge of DDG. They can split, sniff and store all that data, even if they atm don't know how to decrypt some traffic. One day they will know. It's friking 1984^2

If I recall correctly, DDG claims not to keep a record of your searches, so a subpoena would not provide anyone with much information.

Isn't DDG just a search engine aggregator? If they weren't relying on 3rd party search engines, which do record log searches, they'd then probably have to implement a diminished search themselves. A search implementation which I imagine would be severely hampered by a lack of logs.

I don't really see how their model is sustainable at scale.

Yep, exactly.

Now, this makes me wonder: What could be an equivalent implementation for e-mails. An e-mail host that encourages immediate download, totally deletes e-mail contents, deletes logs of any sort, etc. when you delete messages?

The first thing to do is to avoid using the most popular email hosts. The world's email should not be centralized around some popular service like Gmail, but should be distributed over many hosts and countries.

And we also need distributed search engines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_search_engine).

You mean the way things used to be before GMail showed up? Back when we had mail quotas? Back when 10MB of email storage was the norm?

I'd be happy even with a host that allows you to delete e-mails en masse, or auto-delete them after a set period of time, say 180 days, which is how much is necessary to pass before the US government considers e-mail "free for all".

You could also try Bitmessage or Retroshare, where e-mails are automatically encrypted, and P2P (no central server).

You can start your own mail server and make it encrypt all incoming messages with your GPG or SMIME public key. This way NSA will have to collect your old messages from various senders' servers (or the archive made by their sniffers).

That's the second time I've seen someone use GPG and the first time I assumed it was a mistype and they meant "PGP", so I looked it up. Just in case anyone was in the same boat as me:

http://gnupg.org

That's pretty close to what riseup.net does.

https://help.riseup.net/en/privacy-policy

Of course, you have to trust them to actually do that.

> An e-mail host that encourages immediate download, totally deletes e-mail contents, deletes logs of any sort, etc. when you delete messages?

That would be POP3.

Never trust any service you aren't paying for.

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