Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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Here is a reason one might ethically believe Greenwald should be thwarted: because they believe that Greenwald is deeply dishonest, making up details about stories in order to fill in the gaps of his narrative and reporting them as if they were facts, so that half the Internet now believes that Google, the one big Internet company known to have actually invested real resources in opposing dragnet surveillance, is instead in league with the NSA, and instead of using Google Mail we should all support incompetent kooks like Ladar Levison.

Now, some important caveats:

(1) It is obviously possible to unethically thwart any writer's agenda. Publishing things you know to be untrue, even in the service of what you believe is a higher truth, is unethical; it's exactly what someone might accuse Greenwald of having done. For that matter, invading Greenwald's privacy by, I don't know, stealing his bank records would also be deeply unethical. But Palantir hasn't been accused of either of these, or, for that matter, anything else unethical w/r/t Greenwald. Feel free to enlighten me here.

(2) If you can't tell, I'm not a major Greenwald fan. Having said that, I also believe the best antidote for bad speech is good speech, so orchestrating a campaign to suppress him doesn't seem like a good strategy to me. It apparently sounded like a good idea to one of Palantir's SEs, which ended up getting the guy fired.

While many misinterpret the the facts, there's a kernel of truth in those discussions that you gloss over.

GMail is not secure against the NSA or even a state judge's warrant. That has numerous advantages for society but regardless it's not and never will be secure against government orders. That's never been its design. Levinson's service was secure against them for certain clients.

The reason the anti-NSA crowd is intrigued by him is the same reason sources told their secrets to Bob Woodward. He proved willing to protect Deep Throat's identity despite immense effort to out it. Similarly Levinson was willing to risk his business and contempt proceedings to protect Snowden.

Am I reading this comment correctly? Is this a comment that argues that Lavabit, which "encrypted" mails serverside and didn't even have forward secrecy enabled in its TLS configuration, was more secure than Google Mail?

I'd assume not since your reply misses the point.

The government's wiretap order and the subsequent contempt proceedings suggests that despite the technical problems of Lavabit, the government did not get the data they sought. Had Snowden used GMail, do you believe the government would have received the information they sought?

This isn't security in the sense you'd use it in an audit. It's just a design decision. In the vernacular, designs that permit the release of private information are sometimes called insecure.

Lavabit was just as susceptible to a state warrant though. That's why Levison had to shut it down (despite having no objection with complying with other warrants previously).

Here is a reason one might ethically believe Greenwald should be thwarted: because they believe that Greenwald is deeply dishonest, making up details about stories in order to fill in the gaps of his narrative and reporting them as if they were facts

Weren't the people trying to (order people to) thwart him in the best position to know whether details were actually made up?

You seem to think the US warrant process hasn't been made subservient to enabling dragnet surveillance.

Unless a service enables you to put your data really truly out of reach of any demand for it, those NSA slides about which companies are part of the Prism program are probably an accurate list of companies enabling dragnet surveillance.

No, I am not assuming that.

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