NSLs can't legally request ANYTHING. They are UNCONSTITUTIONAL. The government has NO AUTHORITY to issue them. The fact that they are presently limiting themselves to illegal request x instead of illegal request y is not relevant.

Let's skip the abuses of the FBI et al and talk about the government as a whole for a minute.

Are you aware that the NSA monitors _all_ traffic at major exchanges in the US?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_co...

The USA reads your mail and messages at several different steps along the way.

See also: recent changes in Skype to allow for wiretapping at the request of the US government.

Moreover, your comment may actually be incorrect; a good chunk of all the mail Gmail handles is never on the wire in a format that can be decrypted with any known attack without access to Google's (often pinned) secret keys. The NSA's ability to snarf it off the wire, stipulated, does not connote their ability to read it.

As far as I'm aware the majority of internet users are still using unencrypted plain text email.

you can check this too by looking at the SMTP headers on some mail in your inbox.

It helps against passive adversaries, but if someone's got access to the sending mailserver's network there are active MITM attacks that will probably defeat this.

Option 1: Try doing MITM and sending a self-signed cert for Google. The client smtpd may accept it anyway. (Cost: free)

Option 2: Spend resources to obtain a legitimate intermediate CA cert, and issue a valid cert for Google's mailserver, and MITM with that. (Cost: ca $25k-$100k, maybe less with proper connections.)

The only thing worse than self-censorship after assuming an insecure channel is a false sense of security.

DNSSEC is a debacle. Reprising an older comment:

* Amazingly, contrary to everything you'd expect about "secure DNS", DNSSEC does not in fact secure DNS queries from your machine. Instead, it delegates securing DNS to DNSSEC-enabled resolver servers. For securing the actual queries your computer makes, your browser is on its own. There's a whole different protocol, TSIG, intended to address that problem.

* DNSSEC has zero successful real-world deployments, and no existing integration with any TLS stack. DNSSEC obviously does nothing to secure your actual traffic; all it does is try to protect the name lookup. TLS protects both.

* DNSSEC does nothing to address all the other intercepts, from ARP to BGP4, that real traffic has to contend with. Once you go from name to IP address (or "cert" in the fairytale world where DNSSEC has replaced the CAs), you're on your own. TLS addresses all of these issues except for CA configuration.

* DNSSEC actually reduces the security of DNS in some ways: in order to authenticate "no such host", DNSSEC publishes a sort-of-encrypted list of all your hosts. There's a whole other standards group drama surrounding the proposals to resolve this problem (NSEC3, whitelies, etc).

* DNSSEC fails badly compared to TLS. When keys inevitably get screwed up in TLS, you get a browser click-through. There is no API support to recover from a "gethostbyname()" failure caused by DNSSEC. This sounds like a reliability problem, but it's actually a security problem, in the same sense as "the little blue key icon isn't big enough" is a security problem for SSL. We just don't know what the exploit is, because nobody has designed the "solution" for this problem.

* TLS has 15+ years of formal review (it is the most reviewed cryptosystem ever published). We still find things in it. DNSSEC has received nothing resembling the same scrutiny. It's ludicrous to believe we won't find horrible problems with it. You'd be asserting that a protocol co-designed by Paul Kocher will eventually fare worse than one designed by the IETF DNS working group. The IETF DNS working group would basically have to crush some of the smartest practical crypto people in the world.

* TLS is at least configurable (virtually all TLS problems are in fact user interface and configuration problems, not problems with the underlying system). You can nuke untrustworthy CAs. There is no clean way to opt in or out of different DNSSEC policies, as the drama surrounding DLV illustrates.

In the '90s, we designed web security to assume that DNS was insecure. That was a smart decision. "Security" means different things to different people. It's a policy decision. The end-to-end argument strongly suggests that it's something that can't be baked into the lower parts of the stack. DNSSEC is a step backwards. I think you can already see the indications of the problems it will cause just by looking at the places it already falls down. What we need is a concerted effort to solve the security UI and policy problems that browsers have.

If you're looking for protocol-level remediation for TLS's current CA policy problem, you want to pay attention to TACK:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-perrin-tls-tack-00

This is Trevor Perrin and Moxie Marlinspike.

The facts should be treated as such for all sides of a debate, even if you disagree with the outcome of the debate.

"Before yottabytes of data from the deep web and elsewhere can begin piling up inside the servers of the NSA’s new center, they must be collected. To better accomplish that, the agency has undergone the largest building boom in its history, including installing secret electronic monitoring rooms in major US telecom facilities. Controlled by the NSA, these highly secured spaces are where the agency taps into the US communications networks, a practice that came to light during the Bush years but was never acknowledged by the agency. The broad outlines of the so-called warrantless-wiretapping program have long been exposed—how the NSA secretly and illegally bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was supposed to oversee and authorize highly targeted domestic eavesdropping; how the program allowed wholesale monitoring of millions of American phone calls and email. In the wake of the program’s exposure, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which largely made the practices legal. Telecoms that had agreed to participate in the illegal activity were granted immunity from prosecution and lawsuits. What wasn’t revealed until now, however, was the enormity of this ongoing domestic spying program."

Its a recent article outlining what's ahead (and presently implemented) for the NSA. Given what is already known, the U.S. Govt already has access to your e-mail, and they have the capabilities to decrypt it should your e-mail become high priority.

I'm sorry, but the sky is falling.

The idea that they can create collisions for hashes or crack ciphers believed to be relatively secure in the near to mid future is paranoid speculation.

However, if you're going to be paranoid, direct your attention to RSA and DH (plain, not ECDH). In Suite B, which the NSA recommends for use by government, RSA and DH are absent. If the NSA knows of a weakness in anything currently believed to be secure (I think that's unlikely), I would bet that it's RSA and DH, because the NSA no longer recommends them. I think RSA and DH are superseded by ECDSA/ECDH simply because of speed at comparable key strengths, not because the NSA knows something the public doesn't. As an aside, it indicates that the NSA has a fair amount of confidence in ECDSA/ECDH.

I do not think the NSA is stupid enough to play chicken with the public crypto community by recommending encrypting classified information with ciphers NSA knows to be weak. The public could discover those weaknesses tomorrow. The most sensitive information inside the U.S. government and military is presumably protected by the NSA's Suite A algorithms, but other important information is not, notably military communications between U.S. allies, for which Suite B is recommended.

[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/03/can_the_nsa_b...

But it's worth acknowledging such programs exist and don't appear to be going away.

Beyond the AT&T incident (and following legal ruling dismissing, retroactively, carriers from wrongdoing in wiretapping).... there's also the 'TrailBlazer Project'[1] with public accounts from William Binney (NSA , 'Director of World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group')and Thomas Drake [2] (NSA) regarding the overreach of such projects....that it's kinda hard to exclude data and so forth.

Jacob Applebaum (Tor, etc) recently dragged William Binney around NYC to gather publicity [3] - but few outlets paid much attention.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trailblazer_Project

[2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Andrews_Drake

[3] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq3fgwV7doY

I use Skype mostly for IM, but also the occasional voice/video call, what's a better, more secure alternative?

Google, your employer, will not confirm, on the record, what they will or will not disclose when they get an NSL. The NSL statute does not authorize the disclosure of transactional records.

18 USC 2709(b)(1) states that the government can only get "the name, address, length of service, and local and long distance toll billing records"

Furthermore, a 2008 opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel at DOJ specifically confirmed that the FBI cannot use NSLs to get email to/from data, even though the government has asked for it in the past. See: http://www.justice.gov/olc/2008/fbi-ecpa-opinion.pdf

NSLs are gagged, and so Google cannot confirm when it gets NSLs, or for which customers the government is seeking data. However, Google could very easily provide information to the public confirming what it will and will not deliver to the FBI when it receives an NSL. I have asked Google's legal and DC policy team for this info, repeatedly, and hit a brick wall.

For example, "sneak" replied to my comment with lots of CAPITAL LETTERS and links to other information. But I'm already less inclined to trust sneak, since he/she is already known to play fast and loose with the facts.

The fact is, message metadata is enough. I have friends and acquaintances that have been harassed and detained by officials based on their names appearing in contact lists of other suspected-but-not-charged-with-anything individuals. We're not even talking about evidence of actual communications such as message headers or metadata.

The fact that they can (and do) pull thousands of people's message headers and have access to the communications graph and traffic frequency without ANY JUDICIAL OVERSIGHT WHATSOEVER means that their ability to conduct state-sponsored extrajudicial harassment is way out of control.

It truly doesn't matter if NSLs allow them to get the body of the messages or not. If you're on the radar, you and everyone you communicate with regularly is a target. There are no legal remedies for this sort of stuff anymore.

If you do anything of import non-anonymously, you can expect to have your hardware stolen and never returned (under the guise of a search), your travel impeded, your accounts inaccessible (google "civil asset forfeiture"), your social network harassed and detained similarly, and your access to legal remedies hindered in every conceivable way.

A half-dozen examples known to me personally come to mind immediately. I'm sure there are more that I don't know about.

The threat is very real, and trying to split hairs about whether or not "reading your email" means message bodies or just headers is not productive.

The strategy you advocate is what many environmentalists, notably Al Gore, have been employing.

It turns out that most people aren't as dumb as you think. They pick up on the fact that they're being misled. And that tends to turn them against your mission.

Thus, many people are now desensitized to warning of climate change. They've seen the scientists lying and conspiring to gag dissenting views, and cherry-picking studies to highlight the worst possible outcomes. And if those scientists (rogues that they might be) need to gag the dissenters, they must not have very strong arguments.

Please note: I don't mean to take a side here in the climate debate, only to illustrate how one strategy used in that debate is having an effect opposite to what was intended.

I don't have the speaking skills to convince the world of this, but coming of age after 9/11, I have seen first-hand the awesome power of fear.

[edit] So, and correct me if I'm wrong here, you are saying that after seeing the damage that fear has done to your culture (which I would say is far, far greater than the damage done to New York on 911), you then think that you should stir more fear and use it to achieve your political desires. In a just cause, of course. Everyone has a just cause. And your justification is that you don't think you are eloquent enough to convince people by other means? That is a fucking repulsive attitude.

Remind me where the surgeon metaphor fits into all of this horseshit.

i.e. exactly what you're (ostensibly) trying to oppose.

Replacing one form of control with another is not progress :)

Does reading your library records count... How do you know the same hasn't been done with your email? You don't. Because it's secret. Is this an open society? A free society?