Item — HN Reader

While this is sub-optimal, I would suggest that everyone should assume this is where most countries will eventually land. I would not waste too much energy debating this, in my humble opinion.

Even if we don't all end up in dystopian bubbles that have some legal tie back to the U.S., the focus should be around proper architecture, defense in depth, plausible deniability by design, etc. If you are not required to keep logs, then don't. If you are, encrypt them with half of a key. You get half of the key and your customers get half of the key. Yes, logs per tenant. This is getting _somewhat_ easier to do these days. Design decentralized or partially centralized systems that permit delegation of control over encryption of data so that lawful intercept is less useful and so that hacking a thing is less effective both technically and legally. I.e. encrypted data-stores that you and your customers can partake in the legal custody of the data. Once you receive the NSL, you won't be able to talk about it and warrant canaries may not always be feasible either, so design your systems with that in mind.

If you code products that folks will use to protect their families freedom and/or way of life, then please consider the attack vectors and generalize your way out of them and/or create really easy to read docs that people can take away action items from and implement.

I only mention this because HN is full of intelligent creative thinkers, engineers, architects and highly experienced attorneys. Hopefully a few doc/tech writers too!

...now back to my really bad coffee.

1 comments

I absolutely would not give up on fighting the political angle of this. Public trust in government to be any more honest or effective than any other clump of people (corporation) is going down across the board, the time for a new political party is coming. We technically-aware people are a significant voting block.

Also, though I agree adding technical security is a MUST, what happens when the FBI hacks your computer directly to record the logs itself? Or backdoors your OS? Or even makes a law making TOR or the fundamental technologies of self protection into "hacker tools that subvert government's rightful knowledge?"

Absolutely, I am not suggesting a defeatist posture. Rather, just design around the problem because that is what folks here can do. Those are the only actionable items I envision folks at HN contributing to. That said, I could incorrectly assuming that most here are technical in nature.

In my experience there just aren't enough people that care to actually do anything more than debate issues. Debate is a great way to think through problems and try to get the facts. Until these facts cost businesses a lot of money or put excessive burden on the courts, I just don't see this changing is all I am saying. If anything, this helps feed the self feeding system, so there just isn't any incentive for those in power to change deviate from business as usual.

In a morbid sense, I am actually curious to see how this plays out. They (the feds) may be opening a can of worms that is bigger than they imagine, as this may have other potentially complex legal ramifications that folks just didn't really think through.