Yeah, sure:
> Primarily the CLOUD Act amends the Stored Communications Act (SCA) of 1986 to allow federal law enforcement to compel U.S.-based technology companies via warrant or subpoena to provide requested data stored on servers regardless of whether the data are stored in the U.S. or on foreign soil.
CF has a lot more privacy minded people to whistle blow on that if they were lying than your local ISP would.
People at Yahoo were monitoring e-mail on behest of the US government, and not even telling the company's CISO about it:
* https://www.reuters.com/article/us-yahoo-nsa-exclusive-idUSK...
* https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/report-fbi-andor...
Yes, the Core Secrets leak said the "FBI" would "compel" companies to "SIGINT-enable" their networks if in America. In the Lavabit case, the judge was cool with FBI's proposal to compromise all the users, not tell them about it, and business owner's revenue would be fine. If overseas, there was a spy/soldier group that would take espionage-style action against them. That's if a payment didn't work.
I assume they backdoored all of them, including Apple, with them instructing the companies to hide that fact. They then use parallel construction for the important cases. The less-important cases would go through the regular system. The FBI made a big deal about that one phone to try to expand the All Writs Act to make their access easier. At this point, they probably have access to a lot of it but want their legal, observable powers to be expanded.
That's how it works in a Dual State: a police state with a regular government you can defend against running side-by-side with a more powerful, secret government that can do whatever they want to many targets with secrecy and criminal immunity. Unlike previous Dual States, they restrict the targets and methods of the Deep State more to make its damage invisible to most voters. They think it won't hurt them, just deserving people. Meanwhile, they gradually shift more power previously afforded by the Deep State to the Public State while Deep State collects and passes more information over time to the enforcers of the Public State.
The Snowden leaks confirmed both Deep State activities and the collaboration between the two with denials built in.
Going by the Apple example, they refused to create new code to do something they were not in the past. That limit made the courts agree with them that they could not be compelled to create something new.
Yahoo / ISPs already have the data so they have to comply with the law by providing that data upon request.
Data is being sent to CF: can they be forced to raise the logging level from "INFO" to "DEBUG"? See also Lavabit:
> Lavabit is an open-source encrypted webmail service, founded in 2004. The service suspended its operations on August 8, 2013 after the U.S. Federal Government ordered it to turn over its Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) private keys, in order to allow the government to spy on Edward Snowden's email.[2][3][4][5]
If your adversary is the United States government, then no, DoH isn't great for you if you're not in the United States and if the US can't get to your ISP / DNS provider anyway, and if your only DoH endpoints are owned by US companies. You also have much bigger problems than DoH is attempting to solve.
In my (non-EU) country, ISPs are subject to relatively strict regulations, and Cloudflare doesn't fall under those regulations.
> One thing to consider also is that unencrypted DNS means that virtually anyone can read (and modify) those requests
Not "virtually anyone", it would require physical access to the GPON fibre between my home and the MSAN/CO/Exchange (non-trivial, scales really bandly), or the MetroEthernet backhaul from the MSAN to the BNG (where they would trip alarms and the last-mile provider would investigate). From the BNG onwards traffic is encrypted on-the-wire (MPLS with group encryption as far as I know) until it is handed over to the ISP. My ISP co-locates caching DNS with their hand-over routers, so here it would require tapping the fibres in their data-center (not happening without their knowledge).
Also, someone who is just mass-collecting my DNS requests without any other identifying data, and no ability to correlate IP address to users, has limited privacy exposure.
A centralised third-party, who can correlate source IP addresses with user-identifying browser cookies from other HTTP requests in the same time window seems like a much bigger privacy concern.
Americans, please sort out your last-mile provider+ISP monopolies (e.g. lobby your politicians for regulations that enforce competition), so that you can stop forcing unnecessary technical solutions on the rest of the world, who doesn't have this problem (if ISPs do anti-customer things, they lose business).
Kind of off topic, but I was wondering if ISPs use any encryption whatsoever between the home and their IX/servers. Could you theoretically attach something to the wire in the ground, or monitor a satellite-based internet signal, and observe the HTTP/unencrypted data?
Multiplexing on what?
Light.
Optical fibres can move _way_ more data than actual households need, so you use one fibre to move data for, say, 16 endpoints until you get closer, and split it later, saving the cost of 15 long fibres.
You can do everything so that there are no active components out in the field where it's annoying except at the customer site, a passive splitter is quite capable of shoving frequencies A-A' to Alice, B-B' to Bob and so on, it's not just solid state it's completely passive, no more likely to need maintenance than, say, the fibre itself.
Wouldn't say that the cost benefits are from that, majority of the cost is going to be from putting fibre into the ground or on poles, same cost for 1 or 200 pairs. The real benefit is that you don't need any active equipment like in an ethernet distribution network.
Is it? I guess that's conceivable though it looks _optional_ to me, but I have no statistics as to how widely the option is taken up.
Nevertheless the G.948 work basically doesn't care about eavesdroppers. The threat model they've engineered around is that Eve lives next to Bob, and so if she tweaks the ONT (which legally belongs to her ISP but is on her property) she can see Bob's messages, whereas we're talking about a fibre tap to receive everybody's messages and then we'll root through that for Bob's messages.
G.948 as amended makes random keys in each ONT and sends them to the OLT, knowing Eve can't see the key chosen by Bob's ONT (it passes upstream not downstream). But as an eavesdropper with a fibre tap we do see both directions so this countermeasure doesn't inconvenience us.
Good on them for spelling out a threat model, and to me their model seems reasonable (if Alice buys Premium Sports for $180 per month we don't want Bob to watch Premium Sports free by pirating Alice's data) but it doesn't stop bad guys snooping this traffic.
One thing to consider also is that unencrypted DNS means that virtually anyone can read (and modify) those requests, not just your ISP. That can be before the data enters your ISPs network, or at any point that isn't physically or technically well protected. Or, in the case of state actors, at any point really.