nanog mailing list archives

Re: The US government has betrayed the Internet. We need to take it back


From: Eugen Leitl <eugen () leitl org>
Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2013 22:16:22 +0200

On Fri, Sep 06, 2013 at 01:04:48PM -0700, Michael Thomas wrote:

I'd say we already have those things too in the form of PGP/SMIME.
Who knows what the NSA can break, but it's just not right to say that
we need new protocols. The means has been there for many years to
secure email (fsvo 'secure'), it's just that it's not terribly convenient
so we just don't for the most part.

The scuttlebutt is that anything SMTP is unfixable, so XMPP/OTR is gap-filler
until really distributed systems with zero metadata (Tahoe LAFS & Co) come along.

In regards to Schneier's manifesto, it seems he's targeting noncorporate/nonaffiliated
engineers, and there *has* been considerable activity in the woodworks in the
past months. Most of the resulting countermeasures will be more for the
network edge and end users, so not really operationally relevant for nanog.

Sorry to waste your time, but it was worth a try.


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