Groklaw shutting down, because email privacy 'is impossible' | Hacker News Reader

Groklaw shutting down, because email privacy 'is impossible'

pcworld.com

55 pointscruise0215 comments

I'm not sure what to think about this. Never mind that there are many ways to establish private communication, such as encrypted email, which, even if stored, is unlikely to be decryptable in five years or twenty: Groklaw is a site whose purpose for existence is to post long public essays and then have public discussions about them in the comments; I don't remember it ever dealing with confidential information or sources, since it mainly covers public court battles, so I find it hard to see how even a total lack of privacy for all communications would be a rational concern for such a site.

On the other hand, a large part of the argument surveillance is fundamentally emotional. There are only a few emails I've ever received that could possibly used against me by anyone, and even those aren't really a big deal, yet I would still feel vaguely violated if I knew anyone was reading my email; and some of the things I've felt guiltiest about in my life were (small) violations of other people's privacy, even though they did not harm them in any way. So I cannot disregard PJ's claim that the existence of surveillance makes it impossible for her to feel comfortable publishing, though I do find it hard to give it too much weight.

Total overreaction. E-mail is not insecure now because the NSA is scooping up all the traffic or making backroom deals with e-mail providers. It is, and always was, sent over the wire in plaintext. You're writing postcards.

Read Phil Zimmermann's comments 22 years ago that seem especially relevant: http://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html

Don't let the government intimidate you.

Her reaction is not because of a sudden realization that email is plaintext. It is to her sudden realization that her faith in the rule of law is no longer warranted.

An excuse to retire?

She already did that for the most part; if she wanted to stop entirely she wouldn't need an excuse.

Seems like you're kind of putting words into PJ's mouth. Her reason at the beginning is exactly because e-mail is not secure:

"The owner of Lavabit tells us that he's stopped using email and if we knew what he knew, we'd stop too. There is no way to do Groklaw without email. Therein lies the conundrum."

Not really. She talks about the rule of law explicitly:

"You'll find all the laws in the US related to privacy and surveillance there. Not that anyone seems to follow any laws that get in their way these days. Or if they find they need a law to make conduct lawful, they just write a new law or reinterpret an old one and keep on going. That's not the rule of law as I understood the term."

"I loved doing Groklaw, and I believe we really made a significant contribution. But even that turns out to be less than we thought, or less than I hoped for, anyway. My hope was always to show you that there is beauty and safety in the rule of law, that civilization actually depends on it. How quaint."

Obviously it's a combination of factors. But if one of the factors motivating groklaw was a belief in this, it seems that it vanished overnight. Maybe it would've been worth going on if it seemed like anything was going to change.

What's changed is that now more and more people realize the futility of crypto when the government can force you to decrypt or treat you as a criminal just for using crypto.

As of right now, there's like... 300 comments over here at the original link posted 7 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6242569

Any time a broker or bank has a message for you, they send you an email telling you to log into their https website to communicate. It's not that difficult and, no, the NSA is not going to crack any major encryption standards in the next 5 years. But if they do, worry about your broker and bank, not people sending you law questions.

They dont have to crack any major encryption standards. They have other options:

  * Force the bank to give them your data.
  * Force the bank to give them their private key.
  * Store all encrypted traffic and decrypt it some day in the future.
  * Break into your computer and monitor what you do.
  * Force certification authorities to help them with a man in the middle attack.

And probably many more I cannot think of.

Communications is not involved in any of those things. Yep, rubber hose cryptanalysis is always a threat. I get that. Totally beside the point. A private server operator could destroy data as soon as it was consumed, if she pleased.

Store all encrypted traffic and decrypt it some day in the future.

Not going to happen, and if it does we'll all have bigger problems to worry about, as I already addressed.

That's awfully disingenuous, Glenn Greenwald's partner being detained should make it pretty clear to you: you don't even need to be doing anything for the government to target you.

Targeting dissidents isn't anything new, however targeting their friends and family is definitely a very dark precedent to set. The "War on Terror" has been slowly but surely moving towards a "War on Dissent." Not only are dissenters unsafe, but their friends and family too.

The risk for Groklaw's P Jones is not small, however the risk to her friends and family is non-zero. That is most definitely reason enough to abdicate from public discourse.

There is no perfect privacy all you can do it do your best to not be identified by using the tools available however e-mail was never private It wasn't designed to be.

I do appreciate him/her taking stand though.

What about DeadDrop? The New Yorker's Strongbox seems to be working out just fine for them.

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