On Oct 17, 2013, at 10:51 AM, [email protected] wrote:

> 
>> Hiya,
> 
>> Many snippets below...
> 
>> On 10/15/2013 07:13 PM, [email protected] wrote:
>>>> Following up on my own point - not stylish but I think
>>>> in this case justified:-)
>>> 
>>>> On 10/15/2013 12:41 AM, Stephen Farrell wrote:
>>>>> I don't
>>>>> see why we shouldn't be equally comfortable in saying "don't
>>>>> send cleartext" - *if* that's an IETF consensus position - as
>>>>> we have seen sending cleartext is also just broken when one
>>>>> consideres pervasive monitoring.
>>> 
>>>> I guess this Washington Post story [1] that I saw this
>>>> morning would appear to provide a relevant example.
>>>> In that case, I would argue that the fact that cleartext
>>>> IMAP provides interop and is successful does imply that
>>>> some services somewhere will use that for large populations
>>>> that will inevitably (as we now know) be subject to
>>>> pervasive monitoring.
>>> 
>>> What is this "cleartext IMAP" of which you speak?
> 
>> I guess that's a fair comment - we don't know that they're
>> able gather to inbox data via IMAP due to it being sent in
>> clear,  however that seems like a reasonable guess based
>> on the newspaper story which says that collection is done
>> by telcos that are "overseas" and assuming that TLS is not
>> busted for these services.
> 
> Actually, it's exactly the opposite: Details from the article make it very
> unlikely that tapping into IMAP sessions is a significant source of data here.
> In particular, both the article and the source material make it very clear 
> that
> this is primarily about address book information and only secondarily about
> actual message content. As I noted previously IMAP does not carry address book
> information.
> 
> Additionally, there's the peculiar use of the term "inbox" rather than to 
> email
> messages in general. IMAP provides access to all folders, whereas protocols
> like ActiveSync are used specifically to notify users of the presence of new
> messages in their inbox.


Disclosures about inboxes and individual messages were part of earlier 
revelations/declassification:

https://www.eff.org/document/october-3-2011-fisc-opinion-holding-nsa-surveillance-unconstitutional
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/intelligence-agency-attorney-explains-how-multi-communication-transactions-allowed
https://www.cdt.org/blogs/alissa-cooper/1109nsa%E2%80%99s-laziness-masquerading-reasonableness

Alissa

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