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Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

does it mean that before Snowden they really trusted to the telecoms that nobody captures and store their traffic? Or _wanted_ to trust?

Anyway, whatever provider they go with, they should encrypt point-to-point, and thus provider isn't really important. One can't argue though with the God-given right of the national telecom to exploit the hysteria to kick foreign competitor off the fat government contracts :)

The wave of partitioning and protectionism happening in the Internet and other global networks (like Russia trying to build their own VISA style pay system and national/government supported search engine) starts to remind about global trade partitioning leading to and through the Great Depression.

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It seems likely that it simply wasn't given any thought. Not so much that they did trust them, but that they didn't comprehend what could have been done, and so it never really bothered them that much.

Once it was made apparent just what the capabilities were, and how strongly the NSA was utilizing those capabilities, minds started to change.

>It seems likely that it simply wasn't given any thought. Not so much that they did trust them, but that they didn't comprehend what could have been done, and so it never really bothered them that much.

To my knowledge, 20 years ago Russian security agencies were trying to inspect in depth any foreign computer hardware (as there is no other computer hardware existed back then or even today in Russia) that they were buying. Not that one is able to seriously inspect beyond the level of the plastic body of a chip, yet they tried at least :)

That depends on your definition of "seriously" I guess. But there is no need to stop at the plastic. Have a look what the guys at chipworks are doing: http://www.chipworks.com

Also the Russians are traditionally quite good at reverse engeneering ;-) and they _did_ have their own domestic chips 20 years ago.

>they _did_ have their own domestic chips 20 years ago.

No. Not back then, not now. There hasn't been a chip there able to run Word/Excel/email. The best "native" chips are the 30 year old ones, with some updates, in the anti-ICBM systems.

One is often able to inspect beyond that level.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=semiconductor+decapsulation

The fact that these techniques do work fairly well for semiconductor reverse engineering is a reason that recent research on "stealthy dopant-level hardware Trojans" was scary.

http://www.iacr.org/workshops/ches/ches2013/presentations/CH...

Though maybe that's what your reference to the inability to "seriously" inspect chips refers to. :-)

This research produces optically indistinguishable ICs with different electrical properties, which hinders optical reverse engineering.

My impression is that there's still a semiconductor device reverse engineering technique which likely defeats this measure (FIB imaging)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focused_ion_beam

as well as some other microscopy techniques that might conceivably detect these differences, but that it's more difficult and expensive overall compared to optical imaging.

I just saw on the cryptography mailing list that some researchers have succeeded in using both SEM and FIB to see the stealthy dopants:

https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/508

So maybe the dopants have to get even stealthier if they're to avoid expert semiconductor reverse engineers. :-)

It is fairly obvious they still want to trust. They, meaning the German government, also have not figured out how much actual sovereignty they want Germany to have. In both these cases they probably lag far behind what the people want. That's a long way from "trust nobody" never mind building the tooling to enable that way of working.

If you want to avoid balkaniztion, relying on trust will not work. Trust is dead.

I suspect they knew all along but now that its become pubic knowledge that this is the case, they are goaded into action.

They know that we know that they know. heh.

>they should encrypt point-to-point

That does nothing to prevent the leakage of metadata. Who talked to who, when, and how long. You can encrypt the call, but not the number. You can encrypt the email, but not the headers. You have to trust the system routing the requests.

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