we design communication systems for use in war zones.
âIn America, weâre not supposed to have to worry about watching our
words like this when weâre talking to the press,â Binnall said.
What kind of patriotic, delusional tripe is that? This is exactly the type of behavior everyone expects out of the US ⌠except people in the US, I suppose.
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Thatâs nice. So now youâre arguing ⌠what, exactly? People shouldnât run their own mail servers on the off chance that Red Dawn is coming and the bad guys are going to shoot up their mail servers?
The point here is that outsourcing responsibility for e-mail to a third party (Hotmail, etc) may seem convenient, but it has enabled this massive e-mail surveillance system that happens to be largely reliant on there being a small number of providers of e-mail where fiber taps can be easily deployed, and demands for your mailbox are likely to be met with minimal resistance.
But this discussion is not going anywhere. If you do not wish to take steps to protect yourself, you donât have to. I happen to have taken steps to protect myself largely by coincidence; when I started doing Internet e-mail, the only realistic option was to run a shell server. That was many, many years ago.
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Iâm arguing that your suggestion that everyone simply hook up a Synology at home is silly, I mean stupid. Have you done a basic software audit on one?
The news isnât about Gov walking into offices with/out warrants/orders (weâve know about this for 20+ years), it is about all traffic being silently mirrored off backbone switches. In this case private servers will standout.
What else is there?
Especially if youâre trying to keep in touch with friends far away.
Snail mail is also being spied on, and is slower, and it doesnât always arrive. Chat software is also being spied on. Iâm open to alternatives, but not keeping in touch isnât one of them.
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FTW!
I canât see âRichelieuâ without seeing Tim Curry in a red robe and goatee in âThe Three Musketeersâ
And the thing about that sort of repression is that it always sews the seeds of its own destruction. The backlash against Richelieu helped birth the French Revolution, which in turn led to Napoleon cutting a deal to put the Church back in power.
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It isnât delusional view. The US has a lot of problems and it fails to live up to its ideals in a truly fantastic number of ways, but one ideal that the US has always more or less lived up to, especially in comparison to the rest of the world (Europe included), was a near absolute expectation of freedom of speech. The US has no hate speech laws. You can deny the holocaust happened, advocate for an Islamic or Christian Theocracy, or explain how much you hate black people. You can blaspheme all the religions. There is no government rating and reviewing video games or movies. It is almost impossible to win a libel or slander case as you have to prove 1) what was said isnât true 2) the person who said it knew it wasnât true and 3) they said it with the specific cause harm 4) it caused harm and 5) the burden of proof is on the prosecution. Newspapers and the like have a basically infinite license to print anything they want. It isnât illegal to print classified material. It is illegal to steal classified material or violate an agreement to not spread classified material (i.e. Snowden), but the newspapers can merrily print it if they can get their hands on it. The only real place where there is limited censorship on content is that broadcasting obscenity through the air (cable, phones, and the internet are not considered broadcast) can get a network fined.
The US protection of speech is the best in the world, bar none⌠which is why this is horrifying. The last piece of the US constitution that has held solidly against the slow grinding of authoritarian control was the beloved 1st amendment which guarantees freedom of speech. Almost every attempt to reign in the 1st amendment has failed miserably. To have someone be unable to criticize a government policy because of a secret court order is so utterly fucked that it is hard to express. The only thing that gives me some hope is the fact that this is in the courts right now on the grounds that these gag orders are unconstitutional, so there is still the chance the 1st amendment will triumph again.
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I think this generates a sense of false security (running your own mailserver). There have been leaks going past years about the US taps on optical network connections in major internet exchanges and on every oversea cable. It seems pretty clear that an interested party could simply sniff the âmetadataâ or even the full contents of the email before they get to your mailserver. And lets not forget that the leaks have also shown that even the use of encryption is interpreted as a suspicious event worthy of investigation â I personally wonder if that means something like SSL/TLS for transport is enough to draw attention or if they mean S/Mime and PGP etc.
It still may be worth doing though as running your own means that someone canât come after the disk drive or full contents of your email without (probably) you being aware of it. The reason I moved from my own IMAP server to hosted google apps was because I had âlostâ the anti-spam battle and was tired of fighting while also seeing how well google filtered out the crap. Now it seems I might want to move back to my own box and just deal with the spam deluge as a necessary evil âŚ
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I think that we the geek people should find a solution that works even for those who canât make heads or tails of âVPNâ and âport 25 reachabilityâ.
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As someone who follows this issue with some interest, yet is almost completely (and probably hopelessly) in the dark regarding the tech behind it, I heartily support this sentiment.
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exactly, because people just want the easiest solution. Something complex - badly implemented and poorly maintained - is more dangerous than gmail.
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I certainly agree that weâve failed to make it easy for the average user to run their own services.
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No, not a false sense of security. A very real, but definitely limited (in some ways), one.
Directly relating to this topic:
No amount of sniffing is going to provide the metadata on locally-exchanged mail, for example.
The government cannot gain access to the mail spool here by demanding access from a third party. âWeâll know.â
From a more general point of view:
No third partyâs poor business plan will mean that e-mail addresses become invalid (as with numerous failed ISPâs, etc). No need to worry about when Yahoo finally goes broke and closes their mail servers.
etc. Self-reliance has its ups and downs. Weâre seeing that dependence on a small number of large providers has significant downsides.
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Me, my family, and my friends are no threat to the United States; why are they treating us like criminal suspects except to prove that they have way too much money, power, and time on their hands?
Itâs not the threat to the âUnited Statesâ theyâre worried about, but otherwise youâre right on the money. Itâs the threat to their treasonous profits when average Americans spread factual information to one another.
What would these guys do if average Americans educated each other on their military-industrial complex scam en masse and stopped voting in their lackey politicians?
Also, if one of your friends ever decides to enter politics and/or activism that could potentially hurt these guysâ bottom lines (by exposing their corruption), they can easily neuter them.
They already have every email, every chat, all web browsing history and every phone call youâve all ever made to help find your weaknesses (perceived or otherwise) to set you up for failure and destroy you before you get a chance.
To put it in perspectiveâŚ
Imagine the power you would have at your job over all your co-workers if you had easy access to all of their private communications. You could collect the data and use it against them to destroy any nemeses and embolden your allies.
How difficult would it be to use this corrupt power to make yourself move up in the world and keep other people down? I mean, really imagine how much power youâd have at work⌠and then expand it to the rest of the USA and other countries. Plucking valuable business secrets at will, setting up competitors for disaster when you know all their weaknesses and even thwarting journalists who try to expose you.
Itâs about the protection of profits for the 0.01 percent. The fact that if the United States cut its military budget by 85% and it would still have the largest military budget in the world should start to tell us all somethingâŚ
Why go to all this trouble to spy on you, your family and friends? Power and money. In the off chance any of you heathens decide to make real change in the world, theyâll know about it and also know exactly how to destroy you.
Then again, if you stay in line for the rest of your life and support the status quo, you probably have nothing to worry about. Your own data will just be a loaded gun pointed at your head with the hammer cocked, but they might not ever use it. Just stay in line and keep pouring your taxes into their pockets and make do without things like a single payer system for health care, job security, a middle class, etc⌠But, whatever you do, stay in line.
And, donât forget⌠you live in a free country. Stand your ass up at the football game during The Star-Spangled Banner and sing it loud and proud. Donât want to cause any suspicion in the The of the Free, Inc.
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Everyone saying ârun a private mail server from your boxâ⌠remember, thatâs exactly what this LavaBit guy was doing in his eyes. He even ran the servers off VPSâs overseas.
Still got caught. Still got MITMâd. Still got the letter.
The problem isnât where your servers are. Itâs where YOU are. If youâre in the US, youâll get the letter. If youâre out of the US, youâre fair game anyways.
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Unless the email is from a node on your local network to another node on your local network and you have your own email server email will always be dependent on 3rd parties. Thatâs the nature of the Internet.
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Plus your private server has got to get to the Internet somehowâŚ
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So how many politicians will have to have their careers ruined by having their wieners or mistresses exposed before they realize this whole thing isnât a good idea? Or are they exempt from the prying eyes?
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Youâre a threat simply because youâre questioning authority.
So am I.
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