On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 3:19 AM, Hannes Tschofenig
<[email protected]> wrote:
> At 14:56 22-10-2013, DataPacRat wrote:

>> Do either of them provide any protection against a subpoena attack?
>
> Could you explain the 'subpoena attack' in more detail?
>
> Ciao
> Hannes
>
> PS: I know what a subpoena is.

An exemplar could be the attack against Lavabit's customers, which was
only prevented by Lavabit shutting down entirely. More generally, it's
a government issuing some sort of demand, often secret, to an online
service provider, requiring at least that they hand over various keys,
occasionally much more. 'Subpoena' is a placeholder for any similar
document, such as court orders, search warrants, and the American
"National Security Letters". A tad sillily, it's the official
bureaucratic version of lead pipe cryptoanalysis, with lots more
paperwork, and with the claim that the group making the threats have
legitimacy in doing so because they're the government.


My general thought, as of the start of this thread, is that such
attacks could be made much harder to implement and much less effective
by massively increasing the number of CAs (essentially, by turning
everyone into a CA). Sending a lone piece of paper to a single
middle-manager would no longer force sufficient compliance to track
the online behaviour of thousands-to-millions of individuals. Should
measurable effort be required in order to spy on any one individual,
then it seems at least possible that simple budgetary concerns would
reduce the amount of spying done on ordinary citizens. (Of course, my
current .sig quote might apply.)


Thank you for your time,
--
DataPacRat
"Then again, I could be wrong."
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