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Comment by marshray | Hacker News Reader

This is a serious question: How could we trust that his private key had not been compromised at this point?

>Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody.

This is British writing style. Brits leave off the preposition "from" in these types of sentences; Americans put it in.

American English: "Administration now seeks to stop me from exercising a basic right."

British English: "Administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right."

I'm not a linguistics or grammar expert so I can't name the proper terms for all this. I've just observed in the past that this is a "Britishism" that differs from American style. It's interesting to see it here. Snowden wouldn't write like that. IMO, he needs to ditch Wikileaks because they've done nothing but harm him and seem to only be interested in advancing their agenda.

I think all this really says is he's working with a European editor. Which you'd kind of expect since Snowden is an IT guy, not a writer.

Hardly convincing. I am American, and frequently edit my writing to remove extraneous "from"s and "that"s which make it into my sentences as a product of spoken habit. I usually try to make my writing habits a bit tighter than my speaking habits.

Nice work Sherlock. Except I must say as a counter example that I am British and I flip-flop between using 'from' and not using 'from' in such sentences.

You might, but I've yet to read American writing that leaves out the 'from'. It certainly wouldn't ever occur to me to do that.

As an American who often adopts idioms and sentence structures from various things he reads, I will say (for me at least) that it depends entirely on how much, and what, you read :)

We probably couldn't, but I don't think there is any way to be 100% sure of the authorship of something, unless you are physically sitting next to the author.

So, trusting the authenticity of a document is a probability game. If he had signed it with a public key, then the probability of a fake would be less.

He could have created the private key with a really strong pass-phrase.

[insert obligatory xkcd about rubber hose crypto-analysis here...]

Pass-phrases help mitigate the concerns for stolen private keys, but they do not provide assurances that things will not be signed or encrypted under duress. The best you can really do there is throw in more human element to increase the number of rubber hoses your enemy will need.

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