9. Raise awareness of the practical and moral risks of mass surveillance.

My own view is that the risk of surveillance is predicated on the reliability and intent of the Watcher (in this case, the USG through the NSA). If you had a Watcher who never makes an assessment mistake, and who's intentions are always "good" (in the narrowest sense of being in your personal best interests) - who could object to such a thing? But we are faced with a world with plenty of Watcher governments who would oppress their people with this power, and already are. Citizens living under such regimes in places like China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, are people for whom the risks of mass surveillance are real, now.

Officially endorsed mass surveillance is a lost opportunity to emancipate resistance movements from the surveillance of their oppressive governments, which is a huge moral risk to us.

It's important to remind ourselves what the USG/NSA thinks they are giving up if they give up mass surveillance: they think that America needs to know everything because everything is potentially useful in assessing a threat (or an opportunity). To surveil the world (and interpret the data properly) theoretically minimizes a nation's risk of attack, and maximize it's effectiveness in virtually every field (diplomatically, economically, scientifically, etc). That's a lot to give up.

This will never be possible because the surveillance is global, there will never be a Watcher that is globally considered reliable and well-intentioned.

1. http://990s.foundationcenter.org/990_pdf_archive/043/0430914...

I don't like lobbying much, but the fact is that our US political system is less a democracy than an auction. I don't see much prospect of 'a global movement that encourages user-side encryption.' I was all over PGP in the early 90s but honestly I don't remember the last time I bothered to encrypt something, and if you asked me for my public key I'd need to generate a new one. It's not like I don't know how, I just can't be bothered.

I would be curious to know more about EFF's fundraising activity. I can confidently guess that the NRA gets a lot of money through direct mail and employs dozens (hundreds?) of major gift officers to build relationships with high-net-worth prospects. These donors are probably majority old white conservative guys. I'm sure EFF's potential donor base has little overlap with them, and I'm not sure if the same strategy would work. They should still have MGOs to get high-dollar gifts from individuals, foundations, and corporations. But where the individuals are concerned, I'm not sure how they would prospect since direct mail probably doesn't work as well on people who care about EFF's issues.

Here in Europe, especially Germany, crypto parties pop up all over the place since the Snowden leaks. PGP & friends are more popular than ever, and receive more and more attention (although not yet "mainstream").

Is the situation so different in the USA?

I can't even get my close friends/family to install something as simple as textsecure. :(

The thought is that when everyone is just seeking out the cheapest data deal, not only does is unbundle and disempower the giant telcos (a good thing), but it also gets users and developers in the mindset of a single data tier. This is where real security and privacy gains can be had.

For example, I've gotten some friends using textsecure, but they've ditched it after being confused why turning off their data prevented them from getting timely sms messages. (Encrypted text messages are silently routed through data when conversation partner has textsecure, even though the identifier seems to be a regular phone number to the user, just like with SMS messages.)

When users start using all-data plans, tools will be developed to help users go into a conservation mode akin to turning off data, just as they do now. Instead of turning off data, users will be able to use a simple firewall to block everything but voip/text messaging apps.

As an added bonus, any trend toward making data-only more convenient will also mean that using wifi-only devices and mobile hotspots will be equally convenient. Those who want the manual baseband separation of that setup (unavailable on current full-featured phones with radios), will not have to jump through crazy hoops to get it, and so security will take a big leap forward :)

/rant

[1]: http://hushed.com/

Of course there are alternate ways to allow users to do this--Google circles and Facebook lists come to mind--but they all are a pain to maintain, use.

Both perform dramatically better than data in poor reception, and save power.

They might be scared into paying someone money to make the problem go away, like personal firewall and anti-virus (which as we know makes real applications break more than they block malware from working), or they'll do something therapeutic but useless, like some people used to run defrag every day.

I'm not sure exactly what will happen in the future, and besides ever bigger and more disruptive hacks, I'm sure we'll carry on somehow with sillier and sillier measures, adding layers to the ones that already don't really make sense if you think too hard. People always manage somehow.

As much as I hate this term now a days, some way to gameify the idea of using encryption might help spur people's use of the technology. Once enough people have adopted a specific app or software then it's much easier to bring outsiders onboard.

Right now things like PGP are difficult for even "experienced" users to setup and maintain, let alone the average joe. Setting up encrypted volumes, or directories, etc... it just goes over most people's heads and/or their willingness/amount of effort, so they just don't do it.

I think switching from "you should consider encrypting things" to an "everything is encrypted by default" society, propelled forwards by software that makes it easy, automatic, and default... that's when we will make progress.

I think also for that reason it is that our front doors are easy to open by a locksmith without the need of destroying them completely.

Better option than passwords is keys anyway. Way too many services depend on human memorizable numbers, which we know all too well is a transient thing at best - every year, as computational power rises, the "average" password gets weaker, and nobody uses good passwords.

People just need a personal key to encrypt and decrypt with. They need to protect that key, maybe by password, maybe by printing it out. One good key can easily replace all the horrible password schemes in the world.

But software needs to be written, especially save dialogs, to easily "pick" a key to encrypt with, and when you open files a history of keys used and a browser to open keys to decrypt opened files with.

Of course Windows will never have anything like that, but at least Dolphin and Nautilus can look to adopt those kinds of workflows.

To the point where friends have been talking to friends on the technical merits of them, and some have chosen to use Telegram, which is… um, not of the same quality of design as TextSecure, I'll say politely. But it's not owned by Facebook, and apparently that counts for a lot because people really do distrust Facebook that much. (Despite saying that on Facebook, I gather. Irony.)

I have the feeling TextSecure/Signal is frustratingly close to perfect. If it gained the ability to do voice and video well, gained a good desktop client (a slim one, without ads!), and could use usernames instead of/as well as phone numbers, it'd be poised to replace most of the common uses of Skype.

Add metadata protection in some form (onion/garlic routing?) and a distributed network (Tox used DHT) and we'd really be onto something. Although metadata protection is a particularly hard set of problems, especially when you want essentially real-time communication and low battery life. Still, we're in interesting times, and we have tools to make a whole new set of interesting design tradeoffs!

Which users do you speak to?

I have lots of friends who are not technology-minded and zero of them care that WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. Heck most of them don't even know. It doesn't have the FB logo anywhere. I think this is a non-issue.

What's more, my experience has been that most of my friends (on the rare rare occasions when it comes up) trust WhatsApp a lot more than most tech products, because it doesn't have any ads and asks them for money occasionally. Though lots of us don't actually seem to get charged. I keep being given free extensions.

WhatsApp has huge network effects at this point, it's the de-facto standard outside of the USA. So implementing the TextSecure protocol is a huge deal. Not only does it directly help lots of people but it sets a precedent that PFS is not only for nerds and geek products but can be integrated into consumer products too. It raises the bar for everyone else.

Everyone I know who was aware WhatsApp was Facebook-owned brought it up as a strong, overriding negative; others who heard that followed suit.

Perhaps that says more about Facebook's perception amongst that demographic than WhatsApp. (The plural of anecdotes is not data, I hasten to add.)

If there's a lesson from this, perhaps it's: something new and better needs to come from, if not trusted people, then at least not mistrusted people.

Support for multiple active endpoints isn't solved, at least for the clients I use, so I have to hope that whoever writes me picks the endpoint I'm actually at or I have to go through a bit of unencrypted back and forth to make them connect to the right one (I think XMPP actually has extensions for mechanisms that could solve this, syncing messages between endpoints, but I've never seen them implemented).

At least some mobile clients only maintain the OTR session while in foreground, leading to massive notification spam on the other end/delays while the session is recreated.

No encrypted offline messages. (Yes, I know, not possible while maintaining the full guarantees of OTR, but it adds complications to the workflow)

All these don't really make for great UX, and many people are not willing to put up with it.

IM services in general seem to be going away. really saddening imo.

They all just use Snapchat or the built in SMS application.

I just wrote him to ask if he's blogged about this. Send me a message (in profile) if you'd like more info about this approach.

Unfortunately, it takes at least a little buy-in from the user to make encryption work. We need better tools, for sure, but that final piece of holding the key needs to be taught and the responsibility accepted.

Now the horse has bolted and the barn is empty.

> Pressure technology companies to harden their systems against NSA surveillance

Tech companies are only going to be heard in one way: by boycotting the ones that don't have their customers best interests at heart.

> Create a global movement that encourages user-side encryption

User side encryption is great but with the number of exceptions and the way users have been trained to click 'ok' and 'accept' whenever presented with a dialogue box you'd need a major attitude change before that could become effective. In short, nobody cares because they believe they are not the ones in any kind of trouble or under suspicion.

Even here on HN where there is I'd hope a better basic understanding of these issues there are plenty of people in the 'I've got nothing to hide' camp as well as those that believe the state is holy and should be given every benefit of the doubt. This goes for the USA as much as for other countries.

> Encourage the creation of secure communication tools that are easier to use

That one might actually work. But there will always be a fundamental conflict between security and ease of use.

> Reform Executive Order 12333

Not enough data.

> Develop guiding legal principles around surveillance and privacy with the help of scholars and legal experts worldwide

Lots of paper will be produced, lip service will be paid and nothing will change.

> Cultivate partners worldwide who can champion surveillance reform on the local level, and offer them support and promotion

That's pretty vague but it might work and at least help some situations but for the most part the adversaries are nation-states and those have a lot more power and capabilities than you're going to be able to deal with from a local point of view. Bottom line: if they want your data they'll have it.

> Stop NSA overreach through impact litigation and new U.S. laws

The NSA will simply continue to do what it is doing today, only it will try harder to stay out of the public eye.

> Bring transparency to surveillance laws and practices

Good luck with that. Even today we don't have the whole story about what happened 40 years ago, let alone that we'll get transparency in such a timely manner that those directly affected by these activities will be able to make a stand.

As you can see from the above I'm not exactly bullish on this effort, I sincerely hope they'll make an impact but I think that the only place where you could really make change is at the ballot box and sadly that one does not figure into the plan at all.