Two email companies that used encrypted systems, one of which was used by Edward Snowden, have decided to shut down because they were clearly asked to do things by the government that compromised their clients’ confidentiality and they refused to do so.
The bizarre nature of the country we now live in demonstrated by the short letter that the head of one agency (Lavabit) released, of which I will highlight a small bit.
I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on–the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise.
…
This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States. [My italics-MS]
Declan McCullagh speculates that the FBI served Lavabit with a federal court order (secret of course, because that is how the US now operates) to intercept users’ (including Snowden’s) passwords and the company did not want to do so.
Just think about it. The head of a private company has shut down operations because the government asked him to do something he did not feel was right, but he is not allowed to even tell people what it is that he was asked to do.
Glenn Greenwald points out how absurd the situation is (and also includes a response from Snowden on this development) and the threat it poses to American businesses as they are increasingly seen as mere extensions of the US government.
Does that [the Lavabit head’s letter] sound like a message coming from a citizen of a healthy and free country? Secret courts issuing secret rulings invariably in favor of the US government that those most affected are barred by law from discussing? Is there anyone incapable at this point of seeing what the United States has become?
…
Lavabit has taken an impressive and bold stand against the US government, sacrificing its self-interest for the privacy rights of its users.
However, until more and bigger companies and people start taking such principled stands, the government will not be swayed.
To intercept passwords?
That seems unlikely as a technical matter. In even a minimally secure communications system the server should never see the user’s password or at most should see it once at account creation time and immediately discard it. I don’t get it.
Communications themselves, maybe? But even those they should have no access to.
Probably they were asked to reengineer the service to have some sort of backdoor. It would be interesting to know but it will probably be a long long time before we find out.
dmcclean: Any time someone logs in to a web page, they have to give a password. Doesn’t matter whether the password is hashed or how well the data is encrypted, if you type in a password, it can be transmitted to the server where it could be logged.
I believe in Lavabit’s case, the emails are encrypted and only decrypted when someone logs in and provides the decryption password. That’s why someone would want to intercept passwords.
Lassi Hippeläinen commented on an earlier post that the effect of the US’s prohibiting the export of cryptographic software was to cede the market for that product to non-US providers. The Greenwald link in this post suggests that the depth and pervasiveness of NSA snooping may have a similar effect for many US providers of various internet services. In the first case, killing business led to cancelling the prohibition. It will be interesting to see how the Law of Unintended Consequences works in this case.
The letter is definitely chilling.
I think this concern for personal privacy is a trivial side show to the real important issues. This last bit is not the important lesson:
Here is the truly important lesson, the one we need to focus on, the one that demands we use our democratic powers to force Congress to end secrecy that goes beyond the bare minimum needed to protect sources and methods, and not aid the enemy, and to put transparent procedures for oversight and accountability in place.
That is the part that stands out far above any concern for privacy, worries that are microscopic compared to the threat government secrecy and invulnerability to legal consequences poses to civil society and democracy.
I don’t mind if the government takes my silly data and stores it on their computers. What do I care if google.com or prism.gov has digital copies stored on-line? That in itself deprives me of nothing. It’s a distraction from the real issue.
What we can’t allow ourselves to be deprived of is our freedom, our property, our rights to safety in our home, freedom of movement, and above all our free access to information about what our government is doing. We can’t let them block our freedom to speak out in criticism of what our government is doing, and our freedom to democratically organize to stop our government from doing that which harms us or takes our freedoms, and in order to do these things we must know what our government is doing. We must, as Lincoln said, resolve that this nation should have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.
… a company with physical ties to the United States.
Such as having territory on the same planet?
As long as email is computer to computer a site that assists with encryption does not need to know encryption passwords.
If I have your public key and you have mine we can generate an ephemeral encryption key together to use only once. Encrypt your message with AES and send it to me. I can generate its decryption key and read the message. Nobody else can decrypt the message. The message will be transported in hexadecimal, base64 or binary and its 100% gibberish without the key.
As long as both you and I keep our private keys private no one else can decrypt our conversation.
Very brief primmer on public key cryptography:
Each party creates a random private key. That key and some arithmetic forms the corresponding public key. From your private key and my public key you can generate the same number that I generate using my private key and your public key. This number can have over 75 digits and is computationally infeasible to calculate without knowledge of your secret key. Exchange some random junk to augment those 75 digits then generate an ephemeral encryption key.
Right. Shouldn’t be that way for a secure communications system. It should be challenge/response with the response calculated on the client side. (Would that it were this way for all websites, but alas we seem to have a couple of decades of standards bickering to go before we get there….)
The fact that the client “could be” written insecurely is of course a tripping point. The related fact that nearly all websites are written insecurely in this way (although SSL kinda sorta covers it sometimes) is also not really relevant, since if Lavabit was ever a secure email system it could not have been written this way. If it were, the feds wouldn’t need help intercepting the passwords as they could do it themselves.
My point is that if it was ever secure then no server-side change could lead to password interception. But when I made this point I thought they distributed a client program. Since I now know it was a web client then the server could have been changed to distribute a new insecure client script.
The larger point remains that it is possible to distribute a secure client program, and the source for it. If you are running the server and the feds come to you asking to intercept passwords you wouldn’t be able to do so. It will be curious to see what they do when people shift to a service like that, which they presumably already have done.
dmcclean, My point exactly. My “75 digits” came form thinking NIST p-256. A site that distributed code would only have perform basic PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) to allow users to replace lost private keys. Their (public, private) key pair would authenticate their PKI activities. Now if the feds demanded that site’s private key with a “don’t tell that we have it” there would be trouble.
An offshore business, well outside of the reach of the feds, could refuse. This could be interesting.
Yes, those changes would improve security, at the cost of convenience. I heard the reason that Snowden used Lavabit is because he couldn’t get the reporter, Greenwald, to use GPG. You can improve security by using only a third party open source client, maybe compile it from source, and generating the keys yourself, but there is only so much inconvenience that people are willing to put up with.