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Comment by pvnick | Hacker News Reader

Is there any theoretical way to defeat these programs and ensure anonymity? I'm even suspect of SSL given private keys can probably be demanded through FISA court.

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The 100% theoretically guaranteed method is the zerocoin extension: http://zerocoin.org/

Caveat, much higher bandwidth and data storage requirement.

One ZeroCoin transaction takes the bandwidth/storage space of something like 100 (or was it 1000?) Bitcoin transactions. That could add up fast.

Well, not fully defeat, but you could make yourself less of a target by using a series of shell accounts and effectively laundering the money.

Just Google laundering. Techniques are widely publicized and accessible.

Use separate hardware on public wifi. Take the battery out when you're done.

Why taking the battery out? Are you talking about a smartphone or a laptop?

Was that a joke?

What does public WiFi have to do with anything? We're talking about the NSA wiretapping Internet backbones and forging SSL certificates.

We're talking about anonymity, not secrecy.

Oh I see. That works as long as nothing you do online can identify you. That rules out the vast majority of things people do online.

We're not talking about forging ssl certs and never have been. NSA doesn't do that and never will, for reasons which are totally obvious if actually think about what would happen if they did.

Assume they have access to the original pricate keys.

By "forge" I meant using the private keys (obtained through FISA, or possibly cracked) to either decrypt or MITM SSL sessions, not using one of their own CAs to create a valid but obviously fake certificate, which I assume is what you thought I meant.

Maybe "forge" was the wrong word.

I think (not an expert) that with elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman (which e.g. Google uses), even with the private key and the whole session, you still can't decrypt the session (Diffie-Hellman provides a secure channel, public/private proves the server is who it says it is).

That is correct. These are referred to as ECDHE, or DHE for the non-ECC variant (vanilla DH). The last e is "ephemeral", referring to the lifetime of the session key.

The property that this provides is known as "forward secrecy".

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