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Comment by lnanek2 | Hacker News Reader

Wow, shows a lot of integrity closing the product instead of still keeping it up in a compromised state to comply with the warrant. We've seen some other providers here in the US even changed functionality to retain keys used in web clients of secure email at the behest of government orders.

This does mean that the UK is now on the list, along with the US, of places where no credible crypto startup is possible, though.

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> This does mean that the UK is now on the list, along with the US, of places where no credible crypto startup is possible, though.

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.

I think it falls into three groups for communications providers:

1) Laws like CALEA, which (if applicable) require a provider to develop and expose backdoors to the government in advance of a request

2) Building systems where an operator doesn't have access, but where a court order can compel changes to the system, including ultimately shutting it down.

3) Being able to build a system where operator doesn't have access to data, and upon a request, if no data can be turned over, continues operating. Must turn over any data which you do have.

4) No requirement to cooperate, or something equiv to 4th/5th A protections for the end user being extended to service providers.

I used to think the US was #3. I don't believe #4 exists anywhere, at least outside specific kinds of data (medical, legal). The US is at least #2 now, and might actually be #1 in more and more domains.

I think most people completely missed the part of Snowden leaks that directly said that GCHQ is not any better than NSA.

GCHQ are both better and worse than the NSA. I would argue that it seems they are if anything even less restrained than the NSA in over broad surveillance. However it is less clear whether GCHQ have actually broken the rules (and certainly not the constitution) which the NSA may have done.

My view is that everyone (in the world) should be pissed off at both the NSA and GCHQ and that Americans should be additionally angry that the NSA seems to have broken the limits placed on them in terms of domestic surveilance.

For those unaware it may be worth pointing out that the UK constitution has a principle of parliamentary sovereignty [1] - basically parliament can pass/amend/remove any law and no current law can bind future parliaments (they can always amend/remove it). Fundamentally if they say it's legal it is, so rules can be changed at any time such that GCHQ isn't technically breaking any rules.

[1] http://www.parliament.uk/about/how/sovereignty/

The article also mentions this company's new product where additional security is possible because decryption requires data kept only by the customer. Perhaps that is the new way to go?

I was wondering about that, it is described as:

"where rather than hold the data, it is split in two so CertiVox has one half and the user has the other, and law enforcement would need both to access the data."

By data here, do they mean encryption key? If so then I'm not sure what splitting it in two does as you presumably have to join them together somewhere and GCHQ would presumably just attack wherever the complete key is available.

[Edit: Product details here, it appears to be Open Source: http://www.certivox.com/m-pin/]

I don't know anything about the implementation, but I would assume that the idea is to avoid having the service provider be a single point where complete failure can occur. Perhaps this new system offloads that risk to the customer.

But then I get confused, what service is the service provider providing if the customer still needs to carry around half of 'the data'?

Splitting it in two does not mean splitting it in half.

Found some detail of "splitting in two" to assure no single point of failure here https://certivox.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=10420248 "Distributed Trust Authority"

Defining some terms: Alice, Bob, the company, and GCHQ (Eve).

Alice sends Bob stuff, via the company.

GCHQ sends RIPA requests to the company, which means that GCHQ get Alice's communications. Neither Alice nor Bob are aware.

So, a new scheme where Alice and the company need keys to decrypt means that GCHQ send RIPA requests to the company, and to Alice. Now Alice, and the company, are aware of the RIPA request. Bob isn't. But at least Alice can stop sending things to Bob.

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