Perry re-started this mailing list in response to the Snowden revelations about
the NSA's attacks on Internet cryptography. He raised the questions of whether
we could make a Prism-proof Internet.
That's a big problem, and we've been debating small pieces of it ever since.
I'd like to suggest a smaller problem, just as a kind of rallying point.
This list has certainly attracted NSA interest. Whether by subject, by keyword
matching, or because so many of the participants here are clearly "adversaries"
of those in the NSA responsible for gaining access to all that crunchy good
stuff out there, there's no way anyone here could avoid scrutiny.
So ... imagine we don't like that. How could this list be constituted in a
"secure" way? The quotes are on "secure" because even the definition of the
word isn't clear. Realistically, there's no way to avoid an NSA "plant"
joining an open group, so perhaps there's little point in encrypting the
messages. Anonymous/pseudonymous posting? Signed messages? (A few members
post them; hardly any of us do.) Does that just make messages even more
traceable/linkable?
We think we know what it means to have secure 1-1 email. Adding a couple of
additional participants seems as if it leaves the nature of the problem
unchanged, but in fact you very quickly get into trust issues: In a 1-1
conversation, I can decide whether to trust my correspondent. In any
multi-party conversation, it's likely that at least one of the participants
doesn't know *all* the others, so must make an indirect trust decision: I
trust him because the others here seem to trust him. For a mailing list, this
problem explodes - while in addition there are all kinds of issue with how
exactly to set up key exchanges. A moderated group like this could be looked
at as a star configuration: In a way, each participant really only
communicates with the moderator. But that seems to miss the point - despite
the moderation, this group *feels* like a free-flowing conversation among a
group of people.
So what would a reasonable security model for the Cryptography list look like?
Is it inherently just an open discussion? Or could we come up with something
else? If we can do more, what kind of software would be needed to make it as
free-flowing and easy to participate in and manage as the current list?
-- Jerry
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