CertiVox confirms it withdrew PrivateSky after GCHQ issued warrant

One of the best things to come out of all these revelations, in my opinion, is a revised view of what threats we should consider which were previously dismissed as paranoid ramblings.

Well, that sounds familiar. It seems the more governments change over the decades, the more they stay the same.

Predictions of its misuse have been borne out, particularly as the authorized users of communication data were never enumerated or restricted. So we have the situation today where local Councils use RIPA to obtain communication data regarding individual citizens' activities.

This is the institution which allowed U-boats to sink British ships so not to even hint that the ENIGMA cipher was cracked. I'm sure they're utterly incompetent at keeping secrets, and anyone on the internet can deduce their most critical SIGINT capabilities simply by observing how they deal with civil warrants in minor cases.

"The House will notice that the Bill restricts the activities of the SIS and GCHQ for safeguarding the economic well-being of the country to the acts or intentions of persons outside the United Kingdom. The agencies may not and do not get involved in domestic economic, commercial or financial affairs."

So it's not quite as broad reaching as it reads on first glance. It is generally a problem though that laws need to be written so they're broad enough to cover circumstances which might not have been considered at the time of the laws' writing so that new laws don't need to be written all the time yet they can't be so overly broad as to be unworkable - which is why the judiciary has it's role in deciding how to interpret the laws and decide whether or not they ought to apply in a given circumstance.

A warrant might mean that they do not ever illegally hack sites, and that they only ever obey the law.

RIPA is problematic law, and it's nice to see discussion of RIPA cases involving GCHQ.

Not avoiding the problems of RIPA and GCHQ (I certainly think it needs better oversight and I'd prefer better law) RIPA has been abused quite a lot by many other organisations for stuff that US readers may find really awful.

Local education authorities spy on parents to ensure they're actually in the catchment area of a school that they want to send children to, for example. Or councils spy on people applying for parking permits to make sure those people live in that area, and aren't just selling the permits on. Having that activity regulated is important, but RIPA is less regulation and more encouragment.

You're right, that is a bit broad. "In the interests of the UK's ruling class" would be more accurate.

I can think of very few developed countries that, when the rubber hits the road, will let you do what you want. Taking measures to aid official police or court investigations is simply an implied obligation in most countries with developed legal systems. Very few countries will tolerate service providers whose raison d'etre is "we won't cooperate with the authorities" except in limited situations like off-shore banking when the primary purpose is to hide assets or information from people in other countries.

This isn't specific to crypto or police investigations either. Say you want to start an accounting firm that guarantees it will never share your records if subpoenaed in a civil lawsuit. This would never fly in the U.S., not now or one hundred years ago, and while I'm not super familiar with European law, I can't imagine it would fly in any western European country either.

" This is Brian, the CEO. Yea, it was a nice round number out of the air. But it probably wasn't far off the mark.

For all the other comments, below is a blog post on the matter which is going to go live shortly:

With the story about our PrivateSky takedown now public, I want to take the opportunity to clarify a few points in various articles that have appeared since yesterday covering the story.

The headline strongly infers our friends at GCHQ “forced” us to take PrivateSky down. That’s hogwash. In fact, the headline contradicts the article, which becomes clear as you read it.

Secondly, a very important point wasn’t printed. GCHQ couldn’t, by law, request a blanket back door on the system. There are a very rigid set of controls that mean only specific individuals can come under surveillance. The legal request for such surveillance has a due process that must be stridently followed. At no time did I or anyone at CertiVox talk about CertiVox in relation to any RIPA warrant, only the generic process by which these warrants are served.

By saying “our friends at GCHQ”, there is no facetiousness intended. The team at CertiVox have the upmost respect for the folks we interacted with at GCHQ. They took the due process I outlined in the previous point very seriously. We found that as an organisation, and every individual involved there, were as worried about a breach of public trust as much as we are.

Finally, I believe very strongly the following should be a larger part of the public discourse of these subjects. What everyone needs to understand is that every developed democracy in the world, even where privacy rights are enshrined to the maximum efficacy by statute, has laws on the books that mandate that Internet Service Providers have facilities to work with law enforcement for the purposes of legal intercept, to enforce public safety and security.

Being L.I. capable is a very important set features and functions that must be in place for any credible, commercial service on the Internet. In endeavouring to make PrivateSky as secure as possible, we overlooked this critical requirement when we built PrivateSky.

When CertiVox positioned PrivateSky as the easiest to use and most secure encrypted messaging service, we really had two significant points of differentiation. First, even though we held the root encryption keys to the system, it was architected in such as way that it would have been all but impossible for our internal staff to snoop on our customer’s communications, or for the service to leak any of our customer’s data. Secondly, our possession of the root keys, and our use of identity based encryption, made the system incredibly easy to use. For the user, there were no private or public keys to manage, every workflow was handled for the user in an easy to grasp pure HTML5 interface, no hardware or software required, just an HTML5 browser.

We boxed ourselves into a feature set and market position that when called upon to comply with legal statues, we simply had no alternative but to shut the service down. We built it, but we couldn’t host it.

Why? Because as you can probably surmise, there is an inherent impedance mismatch between being able to host a commercial communications service that gives the upmost in privacy to its users, against any breach, whilst at the same time being able to operate safely within the confines of the law as it is on the books in most countries on the planet.

Is this wrong? Actually, I don’t think it is. This may be an unpopular viewpoint, but I cannot argue against having a well regulated legal intercept function as being necessary to have in place for a society that prizes law and order and the safety of its citizens. This is speaking as someone who lived in NYC during 9/11.

In summary, it’s the abuse of the communications interception in the Snowden revelations that has everyone up in arms, as so it should. But that’s not what happened with PrivateSky.

What is our next move?

Watch this space.

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