Set up an email server in two hours
sealedabstract.com
sealedabstract.com
I don't understand this point of view. Your opinion on how fair or legal or morally right a law is has nothing to do with the steps you've taken to avoid that law.
Why do the "basic steps to do anything about it" stop at protections that the technically-skilled can take, rather than contacting and complaining to your Congressperson or otherwise actual attempts to have the law changed?
And how useful is it to run your own encrypted email server if the email message itself isn't encrypted in transit?
It's an argument form of attempting to intimidate the reader, and very lowbrow intellectually.
It's a pretty comically police state'y attitude to say that anyone's right to complain is ever revoked under any circumstances. The author apparently is immune to being aware of his own hypocrisy.
If you vote "none of the above", or spoil your ballot, you have my respect. Heck, if you sit it out and chill, that's cool too.
But if you can't be bothered to participate, or worse discourage others with cynicism (Trey Parker, Matt Stone), and then complain, I have nothing but contempt for you.
That said, running one's own email server is nothing like voting.
(For what it's worth, I think that if you don't like anyone on the ballot, you're much better off encouraging better people to run or running for office yourself.)
It isn't, of course.
The proportion of mail that is encrypted is the square of the proportion of email users who have encryption set up (assuming all email users are equally likely to mail any other user). So if 1% use encryption, only 0.01% of emails will be encrypted. If we want most mail to be encrypted we need 70% of people to use encryption. This means it has to be REALLY EASY TO SET UP AND USE.
Ideally, when someone buys a PC/phone/tablet, and uses it to communicate with others, it should do strong encryption out of the box, so that the user would have to take explicit steps to not encrypt.
Most of these devices run software controlled by Microsoft, Apple or Google, all of which are deeply implicated with the NSA. So it's futile to expect that they will willingly protect their users' privacy. Therefore the next best thing is to write software that once installed will be really easy to use, that is to say in normal operation it will take no effort at all to use (zero user interface).
http://www.illuminatedcomputing.com/posts/2013/07/public-key...
X-Purrcat-Key: ...public key goes here....TL;DR: just make your header Purrcat-Key.
Also, I don't think there's a problem around the fact that most of the time you don't communicate directly with the recipient's smtp server - relaying is definitely a part of SMTP. It would work in the case of running your own SMTP server that you use to relay mail (assuming you encrypt your own SMTP sessions), but you'd need smtp servers to recursively query for the public key if you want to enable relaying.
This is starting to sound suspiciously like DNS, so why not just store the keys there? There are already ways to do that:
http://www.gushi.org/make-dns-cert/HOWTO.html
Add in DNSSEC records and you can be pretty certain you have the right key.
Given most users' utter ignorance about any technical matter (a consequence of the intellectual laziness our age promotes IMHO), I think the only useful way to ensure this is to make it the default in any e-mail client. But this is still only half the way uphill -- it also means storage should also be secure, including remote ones like Gmail, or that users should become educated enough to stop using services that aren't.
The first one is unlikely to happen IMHO, as it would mean companies that depend on mining your e-mail, like Google, would basically have to stop doing it. The other one is even more unlikely to happen as it would require people to actually invest time in using computers, something which our society has constantly brainwashed to think they shouldn't do -- everything should be plug'n'play and trivial and just work out of the box. Heaven forbid you'd actually have to understand the whys and the hows.
Now that our decades-long dream of seeing everyone having access to a computer and to a vast network of information has finally come true, it doesn't look like such a beautiful dream anymore...
I agree.
> But this is still only half the way uphill -- it also means storage should also be secure
That would be ideal. But even without that, something useful has been done since it is practical for the NSA/GCHQ to read all internet traffic, it is not pratical fro them to burgle everyone's house.
If PCs come with encryption as standard, it needs to be a steganographic file system, with multiple keys revealing different sets of files and with the number of possible keys being very large. Otherwise, an adversary could simply use rubber hose techniques to get the information.
> including remote ones like Gmail
Gmail represents a single point of failure and is thus always going to be attractive to an adversary. Anything stored unencrypted on gmail, Google Drive, or equivalent -- one should assume the NSA can read it.
> The first one is unlikely to happen IMHO, as it would mean companies that depend on mining your e-mail, like Google, would basically have to stop doing it.
You're right in that gmail's business model is basically anti-privacy. We need to convince people to use local email software not store their email on a remote website (such as gmail).
> The other one is even more unlikely to happen as it would require people to actually invest time in using computers
You're right, because it's impossible to have a zero-user interface filesystem encryption (since people need to type in their password).
> something which our society has constantly brainwashed to think they shouldn't do -- everything should be plug'n'play and trivial and just work out of the box.
There's certainly an element of truth to this.
> Now that our decades-long dream of seeing everyone having access to a computer and to a vast network of information has finally come true, it doesn't look like such a beautiful dream anymore...
Computers can be the biggest tool for freedom and empowerment ever invented, or the biggest tool for coercion and oppression. I believe this will be one of the biggest political issues of our times.
Talks about "NSA-proofing email" and doesn't mention PGP, GPG or S/MIME.
Should be titled "How to set up a mail server with SMTP and IMAP". Seems only peripherally connected with protecting email from snooping in any way.
If I care that much about the content of an e-mail it will be encrypted or I will tell the person via other means. I assume everything I send via e-mail to be available to 3 letter agencies all over the world, regardless of what server I use.
Emphasis is privacy and compliance, not security.
The problem here is that it is very difficult to protect yourself when you don't understand your adversary's capabilities. We need transparent legislation and accountability in both government agencies and tech industry corporations. A lot of this advice boils down to an assumption that the NSA/DOJ/FBI will "play fair", and there is really no reason to expect them to do that.
[1]: https://ssd.eff.org/3rdparties/govt/stronger-protection [2]: http://youtu.be/HHoJ9pQ0cn8
Hmm...good point. We really need an open-source ISP for privacy to start to work. A fool-less system where the executing code is available to the public with read-only access with write permissions to appointed admins.
While we are are from the ideal world where this behaviour would be without consequences, the matter asks for a change of the situation we are finding ourselves in.
Get loud, get political. Don't dream that you are holding a weapon in your hand because you can half assedly encrypt peer to peer communication. This is only confirming the status quo. Like n umbrella might confirm it's raining.
As side-thought: the same technical reflex might have occurred to that institutions in the first place: let's record everything and we will be more safe.
A major problem with this is that advanced surveillance technology and the increased sharing and cooperation between the various spy agencies and ever more militarized police force is being used to target, spy on, and repress political activists and protestors.
If you seriously, but peacefully and non-violently, try to oppose the surveillance state aparatus and are deemed to be a threat to the huge sums of money they are getting to fight the good fight or a threat to the power they're ammassing, you can expect to be spied upon and harassed at the bare minimum. The more of a threat they consider you to be, the more you're likely to find yourself in jail or worse.
Of course, this has been par for the course for political activists ever since Spartacus led a slave rebellion, and it will not stop the minority truly dedicated and idealistic activists. But the tools of state surveillance and repression have advaced so much that it's much harder for ordinary people to participate in the political process beyond voting for two mostly the same parties, writing emails, or making phone calls without suffering serious consequences.
This is scaring a lot of people off from even trying to make a difference. In many ways, many of us already are living in a dystopia.
That said, trying to raise the political consciousness, technological literacy, and privacy awarenss of the average individual is still a very worthwhile and usually safe thing to do (depending on how radical and confrontational your tactics are), and we'd all be much better off if more people did this instead of throwing up their hands and giving up or pretending it's not happening.
But we shouldn't have to worry about that sort of stuff, because we should have strong laws in place protecting against such mass spying.
Stop with the proofing stuff already. Security is hard and relative. Having a very hardened system can only take you so far. Also it makes you visible - a lot of encrypted traffic is red flag for these kind of agencies. By claiming something is "Villain of the month" proof you just may put someone that really needs security in hot water. In some parts of the world literally.
>By claiming something is "Villain of the month" proof you just may put someone that really needs security in hot water.
+1
a) Hand me a letter signed by a judge.
b) Delay my luggage at the next convenient airport and have a look.
c) Have someone break into my house.
d) Have someone rob me personally.
For all these, a self-hosted mail server offers no protection whatsoever. And for none of them, any zero day exploits are needed either.
This is PRISM proof. i.e. it is not trivial for the NSA to request records from your $emailhost.
However it does not prevent your emails from being read by the NSA.
Firstly, your emails still have destination outside your linode bubble. so you email your friends who are on Gmail? well that in the NSA database now.
Secondly your linode machine is entirely virtual, so there is no way to see if your data has been tapped at the datastore level. How do you know that linode is not in bed with the NSA. Are there any backdoors in the provisioning system? What about the random number generator?
Thirdly and most importantly, most network connections are tapped by either the British, Germans, French, Austrailans or the US. so any network traffic is considered to be entering hostile territory as soon as it leaves your LAN.
So your options are:
Encrypt[1] or not use the internet.
Tor is largely pointless, as who do you think puts all that money and time into operating large exit points? also having the ability to interrogate packets at carrier level make it much easier to do timing attacks.
[1] assuming your machine isn't compromised, or the encryption is "NSA proof"
Edit: had an extra 'w'.
I wouldn't trust the routers and modems either... And there are some problems with trusting the actual computers. At a minimum, USB devices shouldn't be trusted.
NSA proofing your data isn't easy.
Spammers know greylisting. Workaround is cheap for them. That's why you are receiving some spams twice.
My spammers clearly haven't caught on yet...
zgrep grey /var/log/exim4/rejectlog* | rev | cut -c 2-3 | rev | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
8 CA
7 IT
5 ES
4 BR
4 AR
2 TR
2 RO
2 IR
2 EC
1 PTBut that doesn't mean it isn't an extremely useful guide. What would be even cooler was if it would be productized, e.g. by packaging a VM image or as Puppet/Chef recipes - this would make leaving GMail a much simpler proposition to a much larger audience (and make large scale collection of emails, if not impossible, then significantly more complicated) - just get a cheap VPS, do a git clone on the recipe and invoke puppet.
Wiretapping (rootkits or backdoors) are almost impossible to stop. The endpoint is always the weakest point. And I'm sure the NSA spends millions on the latest exploits. No 3rd party hosting service is capable of preventing that.
> Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it.
This is why I stopped hosting my own email.
Obviously emails you've sent out to other servers/domains will be in the clear and will then be indexed.
Yes, that's what I meant. And - aren't those the majority of the emails? If so, it's incorrect to call it NSA-proof.
Obviously they are no doubt snooping iMessages, but if someone wanted to NSA proof their "email", maybe instead they should just forget email all together and think about mobile, point to point solutions. I used to use bbm before they have up on releasing new phones (something they have since done, but too late for me) - they used to have a decide pin you could use to make point to point encrypted messaging - it was easy to use and I assume reasonably secure. Maybe something like that is far better than even bothering with email.
Government sponsored invasion of privacy is infuriating, but corporate invasion of privacy is constant, on a far larger scale, not subject to almost any kind of oversight and scrutiny -- however slim --, and is much harder to stop (partly because it has less sinister connotations in people's minds, and people have the illusion that they're submitting voluntarily). In addition -- and this may be beside the point and a matter of personal taste -- corporate surveillance is used for far more egregious ends.
Why would you want to NSA-proof your e-mail but not Google-proof it (though that would probably be far harder to do)?
That sounds a lot like the "I don't have anything to hide" argument.
The difference between "government sponsored" and "corporate" invasion of privacy, in this specific case, is that you can easily "opt out" of Google's invasion of privacy (which, technically, isn't, since you explicitly gave them permission to do it).
The message here is: it does not matter which server setup you use, be it own hardware, cloud hosting or gmail. If data is seen unencrypted in any place which is not under exclusive control of yourself or your peers, it can (and eventually will) be intercepted.
How is it that we still don't have proper support for secure SMTP among most email providers?
I sit and laugh at people who say they're switching to Linux or moving their mail to their own mail server because of the recent NSA revelations. They're not logging into your desktop directly. They weren't logging directly into your GMail, they're just quietly letting it accumulate as it passes something they do monitor.
Many of us would pay a fair amount for such a product!
Everyone has some responsibility, and for any sort of permanent or at the very least long-lastic effect, people need to motivate and bombard their representatives with letters and phone calls.
I never had a spam problem with gmail. V!AGRA and other spam emails are always in my spam filter. I'd say current detection is around 98% effective with the remaining 2% due to the fact that I haven't tried to correct miscategorization of some newsletters.
They will still know who you are sending email to and receiving from.
The recipient metadata is unencrypted correct? As we've seen recently—the metadata often reveals more than the message content.
And updates always break something.
The one advantage I see is that someone has to write the NSL in the first place so if you use a hosting provider that is very small you'd probably avoid attention just due to prioritization of resources. But that would only last until enough other people become aware of that refuge for it to become visible on the NSA's radar...
Or just get used to using decentralized and encrypted p2p communication solutions. No server to set-up, just the client to install.
There is no problem being behind a NAT, it supports UPnP / NAT-PMP port forwarding.
1. Have Gmail account.
2. Use disc encryption in your desktop/laptop.
3. Have your own email client.
4. Use IMAP to download mail from your Gmail acocunt and to delete mails in Gmail.
NSA can still snoops your email like it does when you use your own server, but you don't keep the archive of your emails accessible to them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Upstream-slide.jpg
The only difference between downloading daily your data to your laptop and deleting it from Google is that they stay in Google servers up to 30 days after deletion. In both cases NSA can read your emails. Either using PRISM or Upstream.