Hacker News Reader

Comment by pyvek | Hacker News Reader

Another thing to note is that even if servers aren't located in US, data may be routed through there. Traceroute from my home connection (in India) to a Singapore IP looks like:

    India -> US -> Japan -> US -> Japan -> Singapore

I'm not saying that the NSA has forced other countries to route their data through them. It could be due to several other reasons. But the main point is that it is hard to escape the NSA. Even if you do your best to keep your data away from the US, there are certain factors out of an individual's control (such as routing).

View on HN

if I'm talking to my mailserver over HTTPS/IMAP TLS, I don't mind where the traffic is routed.

It's still not ideal (they can still see who you're talking to), but you'll never have 100% privacy. Just make as much of the data useless as possible.

SMTP isn't always encrypted...

SMTP is very seldom encrypted. (by volume, only gmail attempts, yahoo and others don't last time I checked)

Not useful. You may be talking to your mail server using TLS, but it's highly unlikely that your mail server is talking to every other mail server (and vice versa) using TLS.

And then, even if all of the servers involved in delivering your mail communicate securely, the reciepent is going to reply in plain text, quoting your entire message...

> if I'm talking to my mailserver over HTTPS/IMAP TLS, I don't mind where the traffic is routed.

You do unless you're using PGP for all your emails, because SMTP can be easily intercepted in plan-text.

Of course, if you're using full end-to-end encryption (like PGP) for all your emails, you don't care so much about using HTTPS to fetch them, because you're using end-to-end encryption.

Out of curiosity, is there direct fiber from India to the US?

No, I couldn't find about any direct fiber [1] between India and US. But somehow while tracerout'ing, the very next hop after my ISP is a Los Angeles based IP. Another thing to note is that there are three direct fiber connecting India and Singapore but it is not being used by my ISP (BSNL).

[1] http://www.submarinecablemap.com/

The IP "location" doesn't say anything.

My Azure IP shows up in Seattle, yet the connection goes to Amsterdam. What you're seeing is where the owner of the IP is located; that is not necessarily the same as the server.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com