Tag: privacy

There will be No Secrets soon.


To Our Customers We designed our phone, video, and text services (Silent Phone and Silent Text) to be completely end-to-end secure with all cryptography done on the clients and our exposure to your…

As each means of secrecy is crushed soon there will be nowhere to be free. Why do I feel more and more like a tin-foil hat wearing lunatic?

I don’t even use these services but I feel that it is important that they be allowed to exist. 

First it was Lavabit:

My Fellow Users,

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. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.

What’s going to happen now? We’ve already started preparing the paperwork needed to continue to fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. A favorable decision would allow me resurrect Lavabit as an American company.

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.

Sincerely,
Ladar Levison
Owner and Operator, Lavabit LLC

Defending the constitution is expensive! Help us by donating to the Lavabit Legal Defense Fund

Then there was this about the Tor servers:

Two of the seven directory authority servers that the Tor Project uses to run its anonymous browsing service have been compromised, along with a new server that the project uses to host metrics and graphs.

The project’s organizers discovered the attack earlier this month and are advising users who run Tor nodes to upgrade to a new version of the software. However, the organizers said that there is no risk that the attackers could have matched Tor users to their browsing habits.“By design, Tor requires a majority of directory authorities (four in this case) to generate a consensus; and like other relays in the Tor network, directory authorities don’t know enough to match a user and traffic or destination,” Roger Dingledine, the original developer of the Tor Project wrote in an email this week.

“We’ve been very lucky the past few years regarding security. It still seems this breach is unrelated to Tor itself. To be clear, it doesn’t seem that anyone specifically attacked our servers to get at Tor. It seems we were attacked for the cpu capacity and bandwidth of the servers, and the servers just happened to also carry out functions for Tor.”

I need bunnies and ponies and alcohol.

There will be No Secrets soon.

There will be No Secrets soon.


To Our Customers We designed our phone, video, and text services (Silent Phone and Silent Text) to be completely end-to-end secure with all cryptography done on the clients and our exposure to your…

As each means of secrecy is crushed soon there will be nowhere to be free. Why do I feel more and more like a tin-foil hat wearing lunatic?

I don’t even use these services but I feel that it is important that they be allowed to exist. 

First it was Lavabit:

My Fellow Users,

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. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.

What’s going to happen now? We’ve already started preparing the paperwork needed to continue to fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. A favorable decision would allow me resurrect Lavabit as an American company.

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.

Sincerely,
Ladar Levison
Owner and Operator, Lavabit LLC

Defending the constitution is expensive! Help us by donating to the Lavabit Legal Defense Fund

Then there was this about the Tor servers:

Two of the seven directory authority servers that the Tor Project uses to run its anonymous browsing service have been compromised, along with a new server that the project uses to host metrics and graphs.

The project’s organizers discovered the attack earlier this month and are advising users who run Tor nodes to upgrade to a new version of the software. However, the organizers said that there is no risk that the attackers could have matched Tor users to their browsing habits.“By design, Tor requires a majority of directory authorities (four in this case) to generate a consensus; and like other relays in the Tor network, directory authorities don’t know enough to match a user and traffic or destination,” Roger Dingledine, the original developer of the Tor Project wrote in an email this week.

“We’ve been very lucky the past few years regarding security. It still seems this breach is unrelated to Tor itself. To be clear, it doesn’t seem that anyone specifically attacked our servers to get at Tor. It seems we were attacked for the cpu capacity and bandwidth of the servers, and the servers just happened to also carry out functions for Tor.”

I need bunnies and ponies and alcohol.

There will be No Secrets soon.

Culture of Illusion – There Is No Privacy.


Just so that you, like me, can feel a little bit paranoid on a Friday morning:

It seems that we are handing over our very selves without even realizing how much of our selves we are giving away.

This should be troubling.

Oh, hang on, just have to send a text…