Good writeup. Since I can already see not everyone here actually read the article, here are some highlights.
> Law enforcement has always been able to request information from us through the Telecommunications Act with a lawful warrant. Because we have the ability to decrypt all data, there is no need to make changes that circumvent encryption. ... While FastMail is not directly affected, we don’t support this legislation because it carries serious implications for the Australian tech industry.
> Of course, should our users choose to end-to-end encrypt their mail via PGP, we have no way to access that content, even under the AABill. Our blog explains why we have never offered PGP ourselves, and describes third-party PGP tools you can use with FastMail if you wish to manage your own encryption.
The second one in particular highlights to me the fact that whilst there are many downsides to the legislation, any serious culprits i.e. state actors or organised crime have many counter moves, severely limiting the upside - something all tech people knew anyway.
Thanks - that's pretty much exactly it. If someone needs end-to-end encryption, it's only safe from intermediate third parties if they aren't trusting software which is updated by those third parties.
So we use effective methods to protect the privacy of our users while performing our civic duty of assisting law enforcement when bad actors use or abuse our platform, and we never pretend to use the bulk of our customers as human shields to protect bad actors trying to hide among them.
It's weird that you take this stance. It almost feels like you're implying that ProtonMail is a bad actor, and end to end encryption is bad because 'civic duty'. That's like "but terrorism".
I understand that you're not a privacy-first company, but still, your communications haven't been reassuring me. There is extensive documentation (e.g. Yahoo FISA) that ALL content not end-to-end-encrypted is ingested for bulk surveillance and decades-long (if not infinite) retention.
The only solution is 100% end to end encryption, with NO mechanism for unauthorised access (including law enforcement). Like iMessage and Signal. Anything partial of that, while saying you are pro-privacy, is IMHO harmful to privacy.
iMessages are encrypted, but it's Apple who hands the client one or more public keys with which to encrypt them—and that's each time; there is no key pinning. They could easily hand you a public key whose private key they or another malicious party knows. See https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 and especially page 58 of the linked https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf.
Would Fastmail ever consider verifying signed messages? Authenticity is one of many things gained through using PGP, and implementing it in the Fastmail interface wouldn't lead to the false sense of security that "encrypted" email in the browser supposedly gives.
Perhaps - though it leads to either offering a way for users to manage their keychain, or managing those trust relationships ourselves - and of course adds a channel where we could be compelled to lie to users about authentication on the message.
Right now the only authentication signal we display on the website is a green tick if the message came from one of our staff or one of our trusted systems.
I'm sure this has been said before, but: "easy" = "i don't have to manage my key" = "insecure because then the existing telecoms act covers this". That's likely the crux of it
When you’re communicating with email addresses outside of ProtonMail, their servers will see your emails. Your emails might then be encrypted “at rest”, but they’ve passed through their servers unencrypted anyway.
To workaround it, for sending to email addresses without a ProtonMail account, AFAIK they also give the possibility to send a link to a ProtonMail interface for decryption.
And also web interfaces are inherently insecure for E2E encryption, which ProtonMail encourages.
This is not how email is supposed to work.
Speaking of email ProtonMail also doesn’t work via standard IMAP and SMTP. You need an adapter to use classic mail clients and that only works on the desktop.
In other words ProtonMail is anti-standards.
And for me standards are more important than promises of privacy that an email service can’t really meet.
Unless you’re doing PGP or similar, independent of the email service being used, then email is incompatible with encryption.
> When you’re communicating with email addresses outside of ProtonMail, their servers will see your emails. Your emails might then be encrypted “at rest”, but they’ve passed through their servers unencrypted anyway.
Decryption is done in the browsers so it's not passing through the servers unencrypted. (ProtonMail is one of the biggest contributors to Openpgpjs).
> To workaround it, for sending to email addresses without a ProtonMail account, AFAIK they also give the possibility to send a link to a ProtonMail interface for decryption.
And you can add the recipient PGP key in ProtonMail settings so it's pure PGP. (I've heard that they're working on Web Key Directory support for automatic contact key retrieval)
> And also web interfaces are inherently insecure for E2E encryption, which ProtonMail encourages.
Not strictly true. The problem is web interface hosted on a foreign host. For a secure web interface see e.g. Mailpile.
There are also other ways of minimizing risk like using Mailvelope that communicates with GnuPG through Native Messaging.
> In other words ProtonMail is anti-standards.
Not for all standards for example ProtonMail is very active in OpenPGP mailing list.
For the record I'm not using ProtonMail but I like that they're promoting PGP by showing that it can be made relatively easy. Too much people think that the UI complexity in PGP is intrinsic.
You're accusing ProtonMail of being snake oil because people can send unencrypted emails to ProtonMail users? If it didn't allow receiving such emails, it wouldn't be an email service, so it sounds like "encrypted email service" is something that you have made impossible by definition.
Perhaps, rather than focusing on "most communications over email" (which don't involve ProtonMail's users whatsoever), it's more fair to ask whether ProtonMail enables encrypted communications with non-ProtonMail email users, and what threat models it is reasonably secure against.
You're right, though, that there are trade-offs to be made when it comes to using web-delivered JavaScript (although these problems need to be solved at the web platform layer [0], not unilaterally by a single service provider), and ProtonMail do not exactly advertise their security limitations (and nor do any other webmail providers).
>> You're accusing ProtonMail of being snake oil because people can send unencrypted emails to ProtonMail users?
Don't downplay the problem. An overwhelming majority of email that ProtonMail users get is in fact unencrypted. Not only that, but an overwhelming majority of email that ProtonMail users send is unencrypted as well.
It might get encrypted after the fact, but that email passes through their servers, which means ProtonMail can be coerced into doing blanket surveillance if the law allows it and any claims that ProtonMail protects you from that are bullshit.
>> "encrypted email service" is something that you have made impossible by definition.
It's not my definition, that's just what you get with email.
E2E encrypted email can only work if it's optional (e.g. PGP, when both parties agree on the keys), which is for secrecy, not privacy, because a majority of email sent or received will be unencrypted, because that's just how email was designed, that's how it works.
I don't have a problem btw with ProtonMail's implementation per se. Certainly it has value in certain contexts ... like if all of your work colleagues or all of your family is on ProtonMail, then you can have some peace of mind, but then again for a controlled, small group you can just go with PGP directly, which would be more trustworthy actually.
The problem is that many of the claims being made are bullshit. No, ProtonMail is not 100% e2e encrypted, in common use their servers will see most of your emails sent and received unencrypted and it will not protect your privacy.
> An overwhelming majority of email that ProtonMail users get is in fact unencrypted. Not only that, but an overwhelming majority of email that ProtonMail users send is unencrypted as well.
Could you cite your sources? I'm wondering what are the exact percentages.
That's no longer the case, you can set PM to send PGP encrypted mail directly, in which case the mail won't be in cleartext on their servers.
Sending a link with a symmetrically encrypted mail is still possible for users without PGP but those aren't in cleartext on the server either (they are encryped and decrypted) in the client.
(in theory, PM could swap code in the webclients but you can use the Bridge or Android/iOS app to circumvent that hole easily)
> Some might argue whatsapp or signal or Telegram E2E is exactly that. I talk about the email.
These three are not equivalent.
Signal is the gold standard for secure, end-to-end encrypted messaging. The client is open-source, and (at least on Android) builds are reproducible. It's possible to audit the code and confirm that Signal isn't intercepting the messages via side-channel and sending them to Signal's servers, encrypted with a different key. It also notifies you whenever a users's public key has changed (ie, when they switch to a different phone), which protects against someone hijacking your phone number using the telecom system.
WhatsApp does encrypt messages with per-user keys, but it's not end-to-end in the sense that Facebook still manages the keys and could provide you with a compromised key. Facebook also produces the only client, which means that it could easily eavesdrop messages and send them to Facebook's servers via a side-channel. Until recently, WhatsApp also didn't notify you when a user's key had changed. This wasn't a "backdoor" as the Guardian sensationally reported it, but it is a security liability for users looking for secure end-to-end encryption.
Telegram is completely insecure. For starters, group messages on Telegram are sent... in plain text. No encryption whatsoever.
[disclaimer: happy fastmail user, 30+ year Aussie programmer]
What I really really like about this blog entry and the Fastmail service in general is that it is practical and clear.
Fastmail does not and has not ever offered data privacy from properly constituted legal requests. Within the service they offer of email (and calendaring and contacts), they protect their user data by having it encrypted at rest and in transit.
Email protocols are not suited to E2E encryption because of the historical evolution of those protocols. So if you want E2E, there are appropriate solutions.
In terms of people who want access to your data, there are two types, bad/illegal actors and those operating under the judicial system. Under the judicial system in place in Australia, as has been explained, warrants (and the equivalent for non-law enforcement security services) are still required for access to an identified person's information.
Fastmail has always been clear that they would respond to a properly constitued legal request.
In terms of lobbying, it is up to all Australian tech people to respond to this legislation and its ill-considered requirements.
I've already written to Mark Dreyfus as Shadow Attorney General and also the senior ALP person on the PJCIS which is responsible for this legislation.
I intend to engage further in the new year with all those relevant MPs, ministers and shadow ministers, with the primary goal of clarifying that the tradeoff between security and privacy is not a zero-sum game, that invading privacy in such a ham-fisted manner as defined in the legislation is more damaging to both our industry and our community than the stated objectives of our security services to avoid bad actors "going dark".
The ability to use standard protocols (IMAP and SMTP) is much more important to me than end-to-end encryption. I won't even touch an email service that doesn't support IMAP with a 10-foot pole no matter how secure they claim it is. I know some people are developing self-hosted gateways that can speak IMAP on the local side and a more secure protocol on the public side, and I think it shows promise. But the whole setup still feels way too fragile compared to good old email.
I've been using FastMail for 11 years now, and I've recommended it to several other people. I will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
My work email has disabled imap in the name of security. My understanding is it's easier to lock down email entirely than to get doctors not to email patient data around, so I kind of understand, but it's annoying to have to read my email either using the terrible outlook web all or by giving my employer a lot of permissions on my personal phone. For context I'm in the US, where HIPAA fines can be quite high (not that that's a bad thing).
Their "Actions we are taking" section is almost entirely composed of a political lobbying strategy. Given the outcome of the vote, 44 votes for and only 12 against, their plan doesn't exude much confidence. I would have expected plans to move data and key technologists out of Australia at the very least.
The company I work for uses Fastmail but our CEO has already decided to switch mail providers sometime in 2019. I don't know what other service they'll choose.
The data hasn't ever been stored in Australia. All our data is currently stored in the USA and Netherlands.
Of course the "people are planning to leave us because of the hamhanded way you introduced this legislation" is a major part of all our feedback to legislators.
The AABill happened the way it did in Australia because our politics is particularly broken right now (seriously, we have a minority government which has change leaders twice and lost multiple members to scandals). We call it "wedge politics" and Labor were forced into supporting it because otherwise they'd look soft on terrorism going into the holiday period, and anything at all which happened would be blamed on them not supporting the bill.
>anything at all which happened would be blamed on them not supporting the bill.
Which is idiotic, since the LNP would blame Labor either way, as they do for every single other failure they (the LNP) are responsible for. I wish Labor had some fucking guts once in a while.
Labor had a series of sensible amendments that would have diminished the opportunity for any government to abuse this silly legislation. I think trying to equate both parties is disingenuous and wilfully ignores a mountain of context.
> Labor had a series of sensible amendments that would have diminished the opportunity for any government to abuse this silly legislation. I think trying to equate both parties is disingenuous and wilfully ignores a mountain of context.
A series of amendments that were dropped, despite the political reasons for keeping them (including the Nauru medical bill which didn't pass). Now, there were a series of useful House of Representatives amendments, but a series of useful amendments to an awful idea really isn't much of an improvement.
Feel free to put Labor above the Liberals on your next ballot, but please consider putting a third party (Greens, Science Party, Pirate Party) above them. We have preferential voting for a reason.
> The data hasn't ever been stored in Australia. All our data is currently stored in the USA and Netherlands.
Though of course, since you're in the jurisdiction of our great nation you have to turn over data if requested anyway (this hasn't changed). Actually I'm a bit more concerned that you store data in the US.
> The AABill happened the way it did in Australia because our politics is particularly broken right now (seriously, we have a minority government which has change leaders twice and lost multiple members to scandals). We call it "wedge politics" and Labor were forced into supporting it because otherwise they'd look soft on terrorism going into the holiday period, and anything at all which happened would be blamed on them not supporting the bill.
Our politics has been broken for almost 2 decades. It's not really a recent phenomenon.
> Though of course, since you're in the jurisdiction of our great nation you have to turn over data if requested anyway (this hasn't changed). Actually I'm a bit more concerned that you store data in the US.
Not for European users. Microsoft is fighting this same fight in the US (albeit with surer footing since the European data is stored by Microsoft Ireland). Basically, another country can compel a company to provide EU users their data as much as they want, if the data is stored in the EU and the request is not legal under EU law this data may not be shared and the company will be in extremely deep legal shit if they do.
There are restrictions in the Assistance and Access Act which mean that a defence against the civil penalty for non-compliance is that it would violate the law of a foreign country if the act would be done in a foreign country (see s317ZB(5)).
But my point was that these protections don't extend to Australian data -- the location of the data is irrelevant to jurisdiction if you're talking about Australian data being stored by an Australian company.
This isn't a matter of where data is kept, the location of that data being irrelevant, but a matter of jurisdiction. Companies with a legal presence in Australia have to comply with Australian laws.
The only other possibility is for the company and its employees to leave Australia. That's not doable, people have families, friends and for the business relocation implies costs, you can't just move on a whim.
That's not your problem of course, however the wave of populism has been spreading, in the US, in the UK, the far-right is on the rise in Europe, so moving around isn't the answer, fighting against such laws is.
The opposition had a list of changes that they were requiring for passage of the bill but caved at the last minute to pass the bill before the end of the year and announce that they would be changing it in the first sitting session next year.
Passage of this bill seems to have been all about the government attempting to create short-term political opportunities and the opposition attempting to minimise their short-term political risk. With effective lobbying, it seems reasonable to assume that the ongoing legal part of this mess can be fixed. Hopefully the reputational damage won't be too severe.
44-12 doesn’t really tell you much about the solidity of this position in the Australian parliament.
The Liberal & Labor parties both decided among themselves to support it, and have policies that lead to 100% of MPs following the party line.
(Don’t know if it’s a good idea for Australia, but it’s the game-theoretically correct thing for the parties to do under the rules we have, so...)
No-one ‘crossed the floor’, voting against their party, because it gets you kicked out of your party. [Automatically, if you’re a Labor MP]
They knew they wouldn’t change the outcome here, and they’d be out of the conversation going forward.
In particular, Labor gave the measure 100% of its votes, but it seems like the only way the party got majority support for it is by agreeing to vote to repeal and amend it next session. It was not a solid agreement.
> The company I work for uses Fastmail but our CEO has already decided to switch mail providers sometime in 2019. I don't know what other service they'll choose.
If the reason for switching is because of such laws, your company could look at providers outside the:
* Five Eyes (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States)
* Nine Eyes (Five Eyes plus Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Norway)
* and Fourteen Eyes (Nine Eyes plus Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden).
There are very few well known and good providers outside these jurisdictions, in my knowledge.
This. I've been trying to find both web and email hosting outside of the 14 eyes, and it's not easy. It's very frustrating. I'm trying to figure out the best way to keep my user's data safe from these kind of legislations (within reason of course). The site I run isn't even that large, but I'm still concerned about these kinds of things stifling my business.
EDIT: note that I'm probably wrong, see reply below by @brongondwana!
---
One problem not being addressed is that via #AABill data access requests can now be submitting without warrants issued by a judge, so it removes the judicial oversight.
Also this law says that all such requests need to be "reasonable", but it doesn't define what that means. For example is blanket surveillance reasonable? AFAIK this law doesn't say. And companies like FastMail cannot report abuse publicly, or the people responsible risk 10 years in jail.
Couple this with the fact that Australia is part of the "Five Eyes", being the only country without a "Bill of Rights", it means that agencies like the NSA could use Australia for their dirty work.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't read the actual bill, just random commentary on the net.
I'm a FastMail customer, but reading this blog article is leaving me worried, because FastMail keeps mentioning "lawful warrants", but from what I've read warrants aren't needed anymore.
It's pretty sad. I've seen many Australian software companies doing a good job, like FastMail here and their reputation is now tarnished due to incompetent politicians. The wave of populism and stupidity has been spreading.
We've never done blanket surveillance, and specifically mention "individual users" in the blog post. There's been a lot of FUD about warrants not being needed - I think the ZDNet article we linked covers that very well:
"[a judge doesn't have to sign off on the specific method by which data is requested] However there must be an underlying warrant to access communications under the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act or the Surveillance Devices Act or state-level equivalents."
So the request still requires a warrant that specifies which communications are to be intercepted, but not a warrant that specifies how the interception is to be performed.
Sadly, random commentary on the net does tarnish reputations every bit as well as facts :(
> There's been a lot of FUD about warrants not being needed - I think the ZDNet article we linked covers that very well
There is definitely a lot of FUD, though I think the ZDNet article is underplaying several quite reasonable concerns about the legislation.
In addition, I've not seen any concrete explanation of how you could make use of the Commonwealth Ombudsman to effectively appeal the decision of assessors for a TCN.
> One problem not being addressed is that via #AABill data access requests can now be submitting without warrants issued by a judge, so it removes the judicial oversight.
TANs require a warrant (or rather, a TAN is unenforceable if it would require the agency to get a warrant -- but a TAN instead is a method to give force to a warrant). The restrictions on notices are in s317ZH (which is a while after the definitions of the notices so people might be forgiven for misunderstanding the limitations).
> And companies like FastMail cannot report abuse publicly, or the people responsible risk 10 years in jail.
5 years in gaol is the limit. There are also processes for them to provide statistical information about how many notices they've received, as well as provisions for courts and the Commonwealth Ombudsman to make public notice information.
> Couple this with the fact that Australia is part of the "Five Eyes", being the only country without a "Bill of Rights", it means that agencies like the NSA could use Australia for their dirty work.
This is definitely true, and GCHQ has already started requesting similar powers in the UK (not that they need to, since they can just use the Australian powers). There are several provisions in the act which specify that it can be used for investigations into "serious foreign crimes".
> Please correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't read the actual bill, just random commentary on the net.
I would recommend reading it, a lot of people haven't.
Im hoping to resolve this using a "searchable encryption" scheme leveraging homomorphic encryption and elliptic curve based el-gamal. This would allow law enforcement to search for key words on encrypted data sets. This prevents leakage for both parties.
THe use case for emails is a tad clunky as the bag of words would require precomputing, however, it is privacy preserving for both parties.
If you feel this is something interesting that you would like to contribute to please msg me. I have working code in javascript (so it may soon be a plugin) and the architecture is decentralized but requires a a single message interaction between the actor querying and the data source.
1. Once a user identifies messages containing the search term, what are they supposed to do then? The message should still be un-decryptable to them.
2. Can't a user search all common words against a message and then rearrange those found to roughly match the message length. There are only so many ways the words "noon begins the tomorrow revolution at" can be arranged and make sense.
1) Can you clarify which users? The government issuing the search query is unable to decrypt the messages. If they flag it, they can order a warrant against the individual to decrypt the message.
2) A random salt is used so only exact keywords will match (I have a fuzzy matching implementation using jaccard similarity and minhashing but that is an extension). To answer your question technically yes, but what you describe would require many interactions with the data source as the content producer must apply the encrypted queries against their encrypted data.
Again, I am trying to provide a solution that is beyond just giving someone the ability to read your private messages without your consent. No doubt it will require work from sidechannel attacks so appreciate any feedback
> FastMail won’t be making changes to our technology or policies in response to this bill. Law enforcement has always been able to request information from us through the Telecommunications Act with a lawful warrant. Because we have the ability to decrypt all data, there is no need to make changes that circumvent encryption.
Isn't this, "No need to force us to install a backdoor, we've already got one!"
Kind of disappointing. Nothing in this article seems to be promoting privacy, just ways they comply with the laws -- and have been for as long as they've been around.
If you care about privacy, shouldn't you move your HQ out of Australia? You aren't allowed to even tell people you've been served warrants now, correct? Gag orders mean we have to trust the Australian Government... we can't trust service providers. Eww.
> Isn't this, "No need to force us to install a backdoor, we've already got one!"
Fundamentally there is no need for a backdoor for emails. The entire protocol results in plaintext being received on the server, and so there is no need to add a backdoor. Email isn't end-to-end encrypted -- you've always had to use PGP if you wanted that.
Lavabit had the same problem when the US sent and NSL that asked for the TLS keys of his server to decrypt the email traffic that Snowden had sent.
Damn, I just lost $100. Thanks. We had a bet on how long it would take for somebody to say "just relocate your entire company and all your staff's lives to another jurisdiction".
Slightly off topic: you have a broken link in your blog post titled 'Submission regarding “The Assistance And Access Bill 2018”'. The link [2] in the line "For more information around this submission, see our <blog post> about the bill" leads to a 404 page not found.
Ah Melbourne in the "between spring and summer"... the storms recently have been impressive. But next week we enter the Xmas slumber and hot weather...
I didn't think Canada was doing much better than us (Australia) with these kind of crazy, over-reaching laws. You'd probably have to find somewhere in Europe.
Not part of any "X eyes" arrangement, but at least some parties within Switzerland are strongly engaged in partnering with foreign secret services, apparently without any consequences by the Swiss state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG#Compromised_machines
So the article's tl;dr is basically: "We're advocating for privacy, but we aren't going to try to offer you any. We never did, and we certainly won't now that this law passed. You're on your own."
Is this supposed to be a PR-positive announcement from FastMail, because I can't quite tell?!
We never offered, and never claimed to offer, a safe haven for people who have broken the law in both Australia and their own country to hide from the police. We don't place ourselves above law enforcement.
We don't have data trading agreements with anybody, and we don't sell or provide backdoor channels - we only provide data in response to lawful warrants.
That's the right amount of privacy and the right tradeoff with usability for just about everyone. Certainly storing your emails super encrypted in a concrete bunker on an island somewhere is theoretically safer along one axis - I wrote a whole series about Confidentiality, Availability and Integrity just over 4 years ago on this very topic: https://fastmail.blog/2014/12/02/security-confidentiality-in...
And the specific one on confidentiality here: https://fastmail.blog/2014/12/15/security-confidentiality/ (excuse the line wrapping, we moved to a new blog platform a while back and some of the older posts didn't import perfectly, but I don't want to look suspicious by editing it today!)
Of course this is reasonable, but I'm curious what you think of companies who do put themselves above law enforcement when it's the right thing to do.
i.e. lawmakers do not always make laws that are right and law enforcement does not always do the right thing when interpreting and enforcing laws. A case to cite might be Apple vs. FBI in 2016. The company placed itself above law enforcement. They disagreed with law enforcement and would not cooperate when I am certain many companies would have cooperated. It was a gamble. As a user, I am glad they stood their ground and I was/am glad to give Apple my money. I've also set my businesses up on FastMail at least twice, which is why I ask.
Maybe only a company with Apple's resources can take a risk like this? Thoughts?
I think enlightenment values ultimately support the position that consenting adults should be able to say whatever they like to each other in private, and that should be a protected right.
This puts me in direct conflict with the way the law is going right now, where it is supposed to be acceptable for government and/or searches to be an invisible third party to all conversations.
Not sure where this goes but I feel like there is an MLK or electronic Jesus moment here somewhere.
Apple did not place themselves about the law, they went to a properly constituted court and asked the judge to rule on whether what the FBI was asking was lawful.
During those proceedings, they also explained how complying with the FBI's request would lead to a highly damaging corruption of the privacy of their users data.
They asked the judge to make a judgement which was that Apple were right in saying that the FBI had over-reached in their warrant.
The case was headed to appeals when the FBI withdrew after finding another way to get the information they needed. Notably they did so without Apple having to compromise security or user data privacy.
> I'm curious what you think of companies who do put themselves above law enforcement when it's the right thing to do ... A case to cite might be Apple vs. FBI in 2016. The company placed itself above law enforcement.
Apple did no such thing. They asserted their legal rights. They used the exact mechanism -- the law -- that you are saying they ignored or held themselves above.
I did not say they held themselves above the law. Law enforcement is what OP commented on and that's what I responded to. I think it's an important distinction.
When law enforcement takes a wrong turn (as the FBI did) it is, I believe, reasonable for a citizen to consider themselves above (read: "better than") law enforcement. Mechanisms to deal with this include constitutional principles (which may also be considered above the law) and, generally, the courts.
Funny how wanting to keep your personal correspondence private is now being conflated with “above the law”.
The concrete bunker thing is a ridiculous diversion. Why are you even bringing that up?
I understand that privacy is a difficult problem especially when subject to legislation but bunkers have nothing to do with it. You will obviously provide user information to government on request, you and your staff maintain the ability to access user information at all times, and you have some procedures in place to try and make sure none of this is misused.
"We don't place ourselves above the law" - AKA we don't believe we are better placed than a judge to know whether sufficient evidence has been presented to allow law enforcement access to data about a user of our platform.
Unless you're starting from a premise that bad actors don't exist, and the police never do anything of value, there needs to be a facility by which police perform the role we expect of them in a civilised society, which includes following chains of evidence and requesting assistance of third parties they find along the way. The warrant system is a check against abuse of that process, not a repudiation of the idea that police also have a job to do.
Who would you suggest should decide, when shown evidence that a spear phishing that stole thousands of dollars came from an email account, whether the provider should be requested to hand over data.
Policing isn't all poo cams.
I'd prefer that a judge tell me whether the police have sufficient evidence for a data request than have to make that call myself.
Thats the problem here. Computers (smartphone/laptop/server/toaster/etc) are/will continue to hold most intimate and private data about a individual. Do you want all that disclosed on one person's word ? I dont. I dont think there can be any check-and-balance that absolutely prevent any person from giving a malicious order. One bad disclose order can be enough to ruin a life. Is that jurisdiction willing to be liable for the compensation (if compensation is even possible) ?
I believe Internet is a country of its own. Its a virtual world, it has no physical manifestation. There is no need to invade Internet to secure physical world.
That's a nice theory - but computers exist in the real world. I have a sticker on the back of my laptop from our NYI datacentre which says "there is no cloud, it's just somebody else's computer".
There's also no check and balance the absolutely prevents somebody punching me in the face and ruining my life, but I still walk down busy streets.
If you have a problem with the concept of judges as the arbiter of limits on the powers of law enforcement, I am keen to hear your workable alternative that doesn't have worse downsides.
You can recover from a punch. You cant undelete your data once it falls on wrong hands and gets used against you (eg debt/purchase history).
As I said there are already enough physical measures (defence, surveillance etc) that can ensure public safety. However If I were to compromise: We can have multiple judges. An order should be vouched by more than one judge. It would be even better if the user can whitelist/blacklist judges to submit. Less bureaucratic liability for the state if data gets leaked/misused.
I think we're talking past each other here. I was pointing out an example of how there's no absolute guarantees that another human being won't mess up your life, not that you need to look at punchers' phones.
On the bunker issue, many people seem to expect us to be like some Sealand with armed forces fighting off hostile government ships. No service actually works like that, and the aren't really jurisdictions where you can just tell the police to go jump. You'll get your uplinks disconnected and your payment systems frozen if there's a high enough value target in there. A Sealand-like service makes no sense as a product for regular people because the cost/benefit doesn't match their needs.
I’m genuinely sorry if I have been a bit rude, dismissive and sarcastic in my comments.
My point, I suppose is that there are ways to architect systems such that concrete bunkers are un-necesary and irrelevant.
The simplest such systems do involve trust in you. I suppose to a first order you are trustworthy since you have explained you will hand over user data upon request according to the laws you are subject to. This is a sane business decision.
Finally, a solid stance against at least business surveillance is a great start.
Not a user and not an Australian but that sounds like a bad deal for customers. Especially since warrants will probably not be thoroughly checked in the future. So the invasion of privacy seems to be seen as a trifle.
> We never offered, and never claimed to offer, a safe haven for people who have broken the law in both Australia and their own country to hide from the police.
You seem to be conflating the concept of "I don't want my emails read" with "I am a criminal".
> We never offered, and never claimed to offer, a safe haven for people who have broken the law in both Australia
So are you saying that just by offering end-to-end encryption yourselves would be "helping people who have broken the law"?
Well, at least it's good to know where you stand and to have this in the public record, in case someone mistakenly thinks that Fastmail is a good alternative to other end-to-end encrypted email service providers.
We've never wanted to be an end-to-end encrypted service provider - there's purely routing blobs of opaque data around. It's not an interesting problem, and it's at direct odds with "email is your electronic memory".
End-to-end encryption is great for "this message will self destruct in 5 seconds" type instant messaging, but I have a friend who recently forgot her password on an "end-to-end encrypted" email service and lost all her emails. Not a great choice, though luckily she hadn't been using it long, so she didn't lose many memories.
An extreme black-and-white view on confidentiality vs the other parts of security is poor threat modeling, and we especially don't like the idea of selling snakeoil where we claim a level of confidentiality from ourselves which is not supportable by facts.
If you want to use PGP for encrypted email, and they supported it e.g. in their webmail - that would open them up to being a valid 'target' for the new bill, to provide access to your encrypted messages.
If they're just a conduit for your PGP (or even S/MIME) encrypted messages, the government can compel them all they like - there's literally nothing they can do to decrypt those messages.
Note: I am not a customer, or involved in FastMail at all (I am Australian though). This is just one of the facets of encrypted email IMO - if it's decrypt able somewhere between your laptop/phone/etc and the other persons laptop/phone/etc, it's not end-to-end encrypted, is it?
The problem is simply that you expect the impossible.
Either you give the factual power to access your emails to some party, then whoever you give that power to can as a matter of fact access your emails, and in particular that means that they can be coerced into accessing your emails, or you don't give them the power, then they can't.
You are demanding that they offer a product where they have the power to access your emails (as an unavoidable technical necessity for what you expect from the product) while they at the same time can truthfully state that they can not access your emails. That is simply a logial contradiction that cannot exist, and any PR that pretends that it did would be simply marketing bullshit.
Not sure what you are getting at exactly, but you can provide browser based email where the browser using J.S. decrypts the email. Obviously need to figure a way to make that AA proof.
You now trust the provider’s JS not to be hijacked. I know of no good infrastructure at present for managing this risk; at the very least, you’ll need an independent browser extension for auditing all the code and ensuring that no unaudited code is permitted, and you’ll need the provider to support it in some measure as well, so that the service doesn’t break when new, not-yet-audited versions of the code are rolled out.
Yep it’s a tricky one. It has to be hosted on a domain you trust. Maybe if it’s on IPFS that’s kind of better but any registered domain name is at risk of being hacked or even DNS itself.
If the web app is served by your email service provider, your end-to-end encryption scheme is broken and you’ve lost, unless you have the facility to verify exactly what code it is that they’re serving up. The simplest attack model is that your email service provider is compelled to serve different code that exfiltrates the secret from your browser and sends it somewhere else, for your user account only (which would, I imagine, get around things like the AABill’s idea of not introducing systemic weaknesses). Next time you access the web app, you have unwittingly granted unfettered access to all your email.
It’s a similar deal on mobile apps; the situation is probably a little better if it’s truly a native app (by which I mean: all executable code comes from the app store, rather than executing arbitrary code fetched at runtime, as with websites) in that they probably can’t serve you specifically a different version to everyone else (I expect that’d need cooperation from the app store provider—not implausible, I caution) and so any vulnerabilities are more likely to be noticed in any auditing that others may do; but it’s also much worse because there you can’t lock it down with a browser extension that intercepts and verifies all the code.
Yes, you can provide such a service. With such a service, you have the power to access the emails. Telling people that you can not access the emails would be marketing bullshit.
> "We're advocating for privacy, but we aren't going to try to offer you any."
Your tl;dr is not quite accurate.
All companies, including FastMail, have to cooperate with local law enforcement. But there are different levels of cooperation. FastMail's level of cooperation, according to TFA, is, "Show us a valid warrant, and we'll show you exactly what you asked for, nothing more".
Certain other companies might be more cooperative, handing over user information in response to informal (warrantless) police queries, or handing over information to copyright-enforcement lawyers who write threatening (but not legally enforceable) letters, or handing over more information than is specified in a warrant. (I can't remember specific examples, but they get mentioned on HN now and then).
So FastMail is stating it will try to limit privacy violations as much as it can, without violating Australian law. This is not total privacy, but neither is it the same as "we aren't going to try to offer you any".
(Not affiliated in any way with FastMail, not even as a user)
End to End encryption defeats the purpose of the "server-side" component of any government request/demand to decrypt messages/data.
Any server-side email platform that 'integrates' email encryption (that is, envelope encryption, not encrypted transports) is effectively not "end to end" because your computer is not the server, and thus it's decrypted before "the end".
> Law enforcement has always been able to request information from us through the Telecommunications Act with a lawful warrant. Because we have the ability to decrypt all data, there is no need to make changes that circumvent encryption. ... While FastMail is not directly affected, we don’t support this legislation because it carries serious implications for the Australian tech industry.
> Of course, should our users choose to end-to-end encrypt their mail via PGP, we have no way to access that content, even under the AABill. Our blog explains why we have never offered PGP ourselves, and describes third-party PGP tools you can use with FastMail if you wish to manage your own encryption.
The second one in particular highlights to me the fact that whilst there are many downsides to the legislation, any serious culprits i.e. state actors or organised crime have many counter moves, severely limiting the upside - something all tech people knew anyway.