
Jimmy Wales threatens to encrypt Wikipedia if UK passes snooping bill - throwaway1979
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/jimmy-wales-threatens-to-encrypt-wikipedia-if-uk-passes-snooping-bill/
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nullc
They should do this anyways. It's well known to the technical elite that
dragnet surveillance is going on— but it's not known to the general public.

It's arguably immoral that the site doesn't switch to https by default and
give the public the privacy they think they already have.

~~~
Ironlink
What makes you think that those with the resources to implement dragnet
surveillance do not have access to properly signed certificates, which let
them Man-In-The-Middle the connection without triggering a browser warning?

~~~
nullc
As you say, some of the parties engaging in the drags absolutely do have the
capability. But not all and stopping them has value. More importantly:

A man in the middle attack is _highly_ detectable and will leave irrefutable
evidence when detected. So it can only be used secretly if it's used very
sparingly. And highly overt interception, if its even tolerated by the public,
at least solves the problem of people having no idea (being in denial) they're
being watched.

Moreover, because MITM can be defeated by de-trusting the rogue CA or via key
pinning using it for "mere" surveillance would destroy a valuable and potent
weapon, so they won't do it. It simply isn't suitable for dragnet use.

Its also practically much more costly to scale. (E.g. instead of passive
optical taps and cheap packet sampling for targeting they must fully intercept
all the traffic and decrypt/reencrypt before they even know if its
"interesting") Simply making the watchers have to spend a lot more money per
unit of traffic monitored is a win for civil rights because it should result
in more conservative use of the capability. Without the crypto the
surveillance is maximally cheap and undetectable... anything is an improvement
even if it can still be compromised.

~~~
Evbn
The cost of decryption is practically 0, though. Certainly not a relevant
budgetary factor.

~~~
nullc
It really isn't. It's only "zero" because you're greatly overestimating the
cost of intercepting the traffic at all.

To do dragnet surveillance you need an optical tap, an expensive phy, and a
fairly modest number of gates to apply a stateless filter purely from onchip
memory to capture 100% of interesting flows and grab some small fraction of
all other traffic, and some modest switch fabric to carry captured data to a
modest amount of storage and processing to deal with it. Programmed correctly
commodity network processors for switches have all the right logic already,
we're talking in the <$200 per 10G port parts-cost level. Detailed analysis of
the sample data and the known-interesting data gives tells you about new hosts
you should be matching for detailed inspection (and you update the can filter
with 50ms latencies or so). The cost of maintaining a cheap military aircraft
gets your terabits of sampling capacity.

Adding a MITM attack on top of the model used for dragnet surveillance
currently, which involves intercepting 100% of the potentially interesting
traffic at all times, performing a costly public key operation per every
single connection, and then reencrypting the results is insanely expensive by
comparison. Before you even get killed by the crypto costs you've long since
run out of memory bandwidth.

~~~
nullc
gah. _in_expensive phy.

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zmmmmm
This is one reason why enacting this kind of legislation is such a terrible
idea for the very people advocating it. Right now most of the web is
ridiculously open and unencrypted. If authorities get the appropriate warrants
it's almost guaranteed they will be able to spy on almost anybody doing almost
anything because the default mode is unencrypted and nobody really thinks
about it. But that default mode is only the default because people think their
communications are reasonably private anyway, precisely because this kind of
logging is pretty expensive and impractical. Laws to enforce it will motivate
everyone to move to encrypted connections, greatly increase use of VPNs for
all non-trivial communications, and ensure that criminals become educated
about how to encrypt their activities.

If governments around the world seriously pursue this, far from reaping the
windfall they are hoping for they will actually kill the golden goose that
could be helping them solve more crimes than ever.

~~~
leod
This is, of course, assuming, that the government is creating this law for the
reason of solving crime and not for some special interests / lobbies.

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SoftwareMaven
Anybody have a guess of what it would cost for Wikipedia to do 100% SSL for a
country like Great Britain?

~~~
TranceMan
Very little, they already have https support - I am sure that they could
handle disabling http . that is not the point.

I see the point Jimmy Wales was making - it's the old: 'if you have nothing to
hide' - and it should stand.

If you want to keep something private you have the right to do that....I don't
care what I do in public....

~~~
nullc
Unfortunately Wikipedia chose to go with a separate cluster for SSL. If they
ran SSL on their normal front end then it would already scale up to this: The
public key crypto is free on hyperthreaded cpus because it can run currently
with memory accesses for other requests, and modern CPUs have harware accel
for the symmetric crypto that make it ~free.

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oliwarner
I can almost hear the politicians now: _Oh please, Jimmy, please! Please don't
enable SSL!_

But seriously, what he's suggesting is the truth. Any website that thinks it
might be seen as slightly toxic for its users will move to SSL if it wants to
stay in use.

The problem with this play is that turning on SSL for all Wikipedia users
would be really very expensive. Encryption costs a lot of CPU cycles and
entropy.

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gregsq
The UK isn't the only trusted western country apparently synchronising
internet data mining capability. Australia is seriously considering a two year
retention of web traffic by ISP's.

[http://www.itnews.com.au/News/313178,public-opposes-
federal-...](http://www.itnews.com.au/News/313178,public-opposes-federal-data-
retention-proposal.aspx)

~~~
simplexion
Not just that. They also want to make it illegal to not decrypt your data on
request. I think lots of people will be forgetting their passwords soon.

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trips2
<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=whatever>

Is that not encryption? Or maybe he means make that the default?

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samarudge
Maybe a little bit of a sensationalist title, websites switching to HTTPS only
isn't that much of a threat, yes the bill is bad and yes he should be opposing
it but Ars seem to frame it as though it's drastic or has a negative effect on
anyone. While I disagree with the bill and the concept of monitoring peoples
internet, I don't think they're doing it so they can find out what you're
reading on Wikipedia or who you're messaging on Facebook.

~~~
csense
> I don't think they're doing it so they can find out what you're reading on
> Wikipedia or who you're messaging on Facebook.

What makes you think that sort of information isn't exactly what they're
interested in?

Even if they don't care about it right now, once it starts being collected, if
any future government decides they do care about it, it'd be very easy for
them to get their hands on it.

~~~
evoxed
This is actually one of the more interesting things about how data is being
collected these days... because we (or rather, our machines) now have the
capacity to scavenge and parse so much more data than we could've dreamed of
before, people, corporations, governments, etc. have already caught on to the
idea that you don't actually need to know your angle before you execute.
Gathering tons and tons of data may seem completely worthless or missing the
point, but the reality is that "the point" no longer exists. It's all just
floating data that, when the time comes, either passes through the filter or
throws a flag.

Basically, the government may _not_ care who you're messaging on facebook now,
but if someone discovers a correlation to some other problem in the future
they'll be damn pleased that they have that data.

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islon
Go Jimmy! Every site should do that anyway. The doors are closing, it's up to
us the let them open.

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est
Switching to HTTPS won't help as it's just arms race between websites and
governments.

Jimmy, if you think you have enough technology competance enough, try China's
GFW.

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jiggy2011
IIRC, under the bill they would only record which sites you visited , not
which pages you visited. So this wouldn't make any difference.

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candeira
"Threatens"? How about "promises"?

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TranceMan
Interesting timing.

Hadn't seen your post.......

