Category Archives: Law & Government

Tools for Communicating Offline and in Difficult Circumstances

Freedom, Online Life, ,

Note: this post is also available on my website, where it will be updated periodically.

When things are difficult – maybe there’s been a disaster, or an invasion (this page is being written in 2022 just after Russia invaded Ukraine), or maybe you’re just backpacking off the grid – there are tools that can help you keep in touch, or move your data around. This page aims to survey some of them, roughly in order from easiest to more complex.

Simple radios

Handheld radios shouldn’t be forgotten. They are cheap, small, and easy to operate. Their range isn’t huge – maybe a couple of miles in rural areas, much less in cities – but they can be a useful place to start. They tend to have no actual encryption features (the “privacy” features really aren’t.) In the USA, options are FRS/GMRS and CB.

Syncthing

With Syncthing, you can share files among your devices or with your friends. Syncthing essentially builds a private mesh for file sharing. Devices will auto-discover each other when on the same LAN or Wifi network, and opportunistically sync.

I wrote more about offline uses of Syncthing, and its use with NNCP, in my blog post A simple, delay-tolerant, offline-capable mesh network with Syncthing (+ optional NNCP). Yes, it is a form of a Mesh Network!

Homepage: https://syncthing.net/

Briar

Briar is an instant messaging service based around Android. It’s IM with a twist: it can use a mesh of Bluetooh devices. Or, if Internet is available, Tor. It has even been extended to support the use of SD cards and USB sticks to carry your messages.

Like some others here, it can relay messages for third parties as well.

Homepage: https://briarproject.org/

Manyverse and Scuttlebutt

Manyverse is a client for Scuttlebutt, which is a sort of asynchronous, offline-friendly social network. You can use it to keep in touch with your family and friends, and it supports syncing over Bluetooth and Wifi even in the absence of Internet.

Homepages: https://www.manyver.se/ and https://scuttlebutt.nz/

Yggdrasil

Yggdrasil is a self-healing, fully end-to-end Encrypted Mesh Network. It can work among local devices or on the global Internet. It has network services that can egress onto things like Tor, I2P, and the public Internet. Yggdrasil makes a perfect companion to ad-hoc wifi as it has auto peer discovery on the local network.

I talked about it in more detail in my blog post Make the Internet Yours Again With an Instant Mesh Network.

Homepage: https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/

Ad-Hoc Wifi

Few people know about the ad-hoc wifi mode. Ad-hoc wifi lets devices in range talk to each other without an access point. You just all set your devices to the same network name and password and there you go. However, there often isn’t DHCP, so IP configuration can be a bit of a challenge. Yggdrasil helps here.

NNCP

Moving now to more advanced tools, NNCP lets you assemble a network of peers that can use Asynchronous Communication over sneakernet, USB drives, radios, CD-Rs, Internet, tor, NNCP over Yggdrasil, Syncthing, Dropbox, S3, you name it . NNCP supports multi-hop file transfer and remote execution. It is fully end-to-end encrypted. Think of it as the offline version of ssh.

Homepage: https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/

Meshtastic

Meshtastic uses long-range, low-power LoRa radios to build a long-distance, encrypted, instant messaging system that is a Mesh Network. It requires specialized hardware, about $30, but will tend to get much better range than simple radios, and with very little power.

Homepages: https://meshtastic.org/ and https://meshtastic.letstalkthis.com/

Portable Satellite Communicators

You can get portable satellite communicators that can send SMS from anywhere on earth with a clear view of the sky. The Garmin InReach mini and Zoleo are two credible options. Subscriptions range from about $10 to $40 per month depending on usage. They also have global SOS features.

Telephone Lines

If you have a phone line and a modem, UUCP can get through just about anything. It’s an older protocol that lacks modern security, but will deal with slow and noisy serial lines well. XBee SX radios also have a serial mode that can work well with UUCP.

Additional Suggestions

It is probably useful to have a Linux live USB stick with whatever software you want to use handy. Debian can be installed from the live environment, or you could use a security-focused distribution such as Tails or Qubes.

References

This page originated in my Mastodon thread and incorporates some suggestions I received there.

It also formed a post on my blog.

The Good, Bad, and Scary of the Banning of Donald Trump, and How Decentralization Makes It All Better

Freedom, Politics, Technology, , , , ,

It is undeniable that banning Donald Trump from Facebook, Twitter, and similar sites is a benefit for the moment. It may well save lives, perhaps lots of lives. But it raises quite a few troubling issues.

First, as EFF points out, these platforms have privileged speakers with power, especially politicians, over regular users. For years now, it has been obvious to everyone that Donald Trump has been violating policies on both platforms, and yet they did little or nothing about it. The result we saw last week was entirely forseeable — and indeed, WAS forseen, including by elements in those companies themselves. (ACLU also raises some good points)

Contrast that with how others get treated. Facebook, two days after the coup attempt, banned Benjamin Wittes, apparently because he mentioned an Atlantic article opposed to nutcase conspiracy theories. The EFF has also documented many more egregious examples: taking down documentation of war crimes, childbirth images, black activists showing the racist messages they received, women discussing online harassment, etc. The list goes on; YouTube, for instance, has often been promoting far-right violent videos while removing peaceful LGBTQ ones.

In short, have we simply achieved legal censorship by outsourcing it to dominant corporations?

It is worth pausing at this point to recognize two important princples:

First, that we do not see it as right to compel speech.

Secondly, that there exist communications channels and other services that nobody is calling on to suspend Donald Trump.

Let’s dive into those a little bit.

There have been no prominent calls for AT&T, Verizon, Gmail, or whomever provides Trump and his campaign with cell phones or email to suspend their service to him. Moreover, the gas stations that fuel his vehicles and the airports that service his plane continue to provide those services, and nobody has seriously questioned that, either. Even his Apple phone that he uses to post to Twitter remains, as far as I know, fully active.

Secondly, imagine you were starting up a small web forum focused on raising tomato plants. It is, and should be, well within your rights to keep tomato-haters out, as well as people that have no interest in tomatoes but would rather talk about rutabagas, politics, or Mars. If you are going to host a forum about tomatoes, you have the right to keep it a forum about tomatoes; you cannot be forced to distribute someone else’s speech. Likewise in traditional media, a newspaper cannot be forced to print every letter to the editor in full.

In law, there is a notion of a common carrier, that provides services to the general public without discrimination. Phone companies and ISPs fall under this.

Facebook, Twitter, and tomato sites don’t. But consider what happens if Facebook bans you. You might be using Facebook-owned Whatsapp to communicate with family and friends, and suddenly find yourself unable to ask someone to pick you up. Or your treasured family photos might be in Facebook-owned Instagram, lost forever. It’s not just Facebook; similar things happen with Google, locking people out of their phones and laptops, their emails, even their photos.

Is it right that Facebook and Google aren’t regulated as common carriers? Perhaps, or perhaps we need some line of demarcation between their speech-to-the-public services (Facebook timeline posts, YouTube) and private communication (Whatsapp, Gmail). It’s a thorny issue; should government be regulating speech instead? That’s also fraught. So is corporate control.

Decentralization Helps Dramatically

With email, you get to pick your email provider (yes, there are two or three big ones, but still plenty of others). Each email provider will have its own set of things it considers acceptable, and its own set of other servers and accounts it’s willing to exchange mail with. (It is extremely common for mail providers to choose not to accept mail from various other mail servers based on ISP, IP address, reputation, and so forth.)

What if we could do something like that for Twitter and Facebook?

Let you join whatever instance you like. Maybe one instance is all about art and they don’t talk about politics. Or another is all about Free Software and they don’t have advertising. And then there are plenty of open instances that accept anything that’s respectful. And, like email, people of one server can interact with those using another just as easily as if they were using the same one.

Well, this isn’t hypothetical; it already exists in the Fediverse. The most common option is Mastodon, and it so happens that a month ago I wrote about its benefits for other reasons, and included some links on getting started.

There is no reason that we must all let our online speech be controlled by companies with a profit motive to keep hate speech on their platforms. There is no reason that we must all have a single set of rules, or accept strong corporate or government control, either. The quality of conversation on Mastodon is far higher than either Twitter or Facebook; decentralization works and it’s here today.

This Is How Tyrants Go: Alone

Politics

I remember reading an essay a month or so ago — sadly I forget where — talking about how things end for tyrants. If I were to sum it up, it would be with the word “alone.” Their power fading, they find that they had few true friends or believers; just others that were greedy for power or riches and, finding those no longer to be had, depart the sinking ship. The article looked back at examples like Nixon and examples from the 20th century in Europe and around the world.

Today we saw images of a failed coup attempt.

But we also saw hope.

Already senior staff in the White House are resigning. Ones that had been ardent supporters. In the end, just 6 senators supported the objection to the legitimate electors. Six. Lindsay Graham, Mike Pence, and Mitch McConnel all deserted Trump.

CNN reports that there are serious conversations about invoking the 25th amendment and removing him from office, because even Republicans are to the point of believing that America should not have two more weeks of this man.

Whether those efforts are successful or not, I don’t know. What I do know is that these actions have awakened many people, in a way that nothing else could for four years, to the dangers of Trump and, in the end, have bolstered the cause of democracy.

Hard work will remain but today, Donald Trump is in the White House alone, abandoned by allies and blocked by Twitter. And we know that within two weeks, he won’t be there at all.

We will get through this.

Non-Creepy Technology Purchasing & Gifting Guides

Freedom, Online Life, Technology, , , ,

This time of year, a lot of people are thinking of buying gadgets and phones as gifts. But there are a lot of tech companies that have unethical practices, from terrible working conditions in their factories to spying on their users. Here are some buying guides to help you find gadgets that are fun – and not creepy.

The Free Software Foundation’s Ethical Tech Giving Guide is a fantastic resource from what’s probably the pickiest organization out there when it comes to tech. Not only do they highlight good devices, they also explain why and why you should, for instance, avoid the iPhone (their history of silencing political activists and spying on users).

The FSF also has a Guide to DRM-Free Living talks about books, video, audio, and software that respects your freedom by letting you make your own backups, move it to other devices, and continue to use your purchases even if you have no Internet or the company you bought them from goes bankrupt. This is a fantastic and HUGE resource; there are hundreds of organizations out there that provide content in a way that respects your rights — and many of them do it for free, legally, as well.

PrivacyTools has a fantastic series of guides on everything from email providers to operating systems, as well as links to a number of other guides.

The DeGoogle wiki on Reddit (as well as the sidebar) has a lot of fantastic alternatives to things like Chromebooks, Chrome, Gmail, etc.

Related resources

Here are some resources for education (what the issues are) and information about what companies and products to avoid.

In addition to the FSF’s other fantastic resources above, they also have a list of proprietary malware. It lists things, practices, and companies to avoid, and talks about the reasons why. Their addictions page is particularly good and relevant to my recent post on the problems of the attention economy.

The Surveillance Self-Defense site from the Electronic Frontier Foundation is a fantastic introduction into how corporate surveillance works and how to defend against it.

Use with a grain of salt:

Mozilla, the people behind Firefox, have a site called Privacy Not Included that rates products by how “creepy” they are. They focus more narrowly on privacy than the more expansive set of freedoms the FSF considers (privacy is one of a number of things the FSF looks at), and in some cases I would say Mozilla is too generous (eg, with the Amazon Kindle, a number of their data points are just incorrect.)

The Rightward, Establishment Bias of Lazy Journalism

Politics, Society

Note: I also posted this post on medium.

I remember clearly the moment I’d had enough of NPR for the day. It was early morning January 25 of this year, still pretty dark outside. An NPR anchor was interviewing an NPR reporter — they seem to do that a lot these days — and asked the following simple but important question:

“So if we know that Roger Stone was in communications with WikiLeaks and we know U.S. intelligence agencies have said WikiLeaks was operating at the behest of Russia, does that mean that Roger Stone has been now connected directly to Russia’s efforts to interfere in the U.S. election?”

The factual answer, based on both data and logic, would have been “yes”. NPR, in fact, had spent much airtime covering this; for instance, a June 2018 story goes into detail about Stone’s interactions with WikiLeaks, and less than a week before Stone’s arrest, NPR referred to “internal emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted to Wikileaks.” In November of 2018, The Atlantic wrote, “Russia used WikiLeaks as a conduit — witting or unwitting — and WikiLeaks, in turn, appears to have been in touch with Trump allies.”

Why, then, did the NPR reporter begin her answer with “well,” proceed to hedge, repeat denials from Stone and WikiLeaks, and then wind up saying “authorities seem to have some evidence” without directly answering the question? And what does this mean for bias in the media?

Let us begin with a simple principle: facts do not have a political bias. Telling me that “the sky is blue” no more reflects a Democratic bias than saying “3+3=6” reflects a Republican bias. In an ideal world, politics would shape themselves around facts; ideas most in agreement with the data would win. There are not two equally-legitimate sides to questions of fact. There is no credible argument against “the earth is round”, “climate change is real,” or “Donald Trump is an unindicted co-conspirator in crimes for which jail sentences have been given.” These are factual, not political, statements. If you feel, as I do, a bit of a quickening pulse and escalating tension as you read through these examples, then you too have felt the forces that wish you to be uncomfortable with unarguable reality.

That we perceive some factual questions as political is a sign of a deep dysfunction in our society. It’s a sign that our policies are not always guided by fact, but that a sustained effort exists to cause our facts to be guided by policy.

Facts do not have a political bias. There are not two equally-legitimate sides to questions of fact. “Climate change is real” is a factual, not a political, statement. Our policies are not always guided by fact; a sustained effort exists to cause our facts to be guided by policy.

Why did I say right-wing bias, then? Because at this particular moment in time, it is the political right that is more engaged in the effort to shape facts to policy. Whether it is denying the obvious lies of the President, the clear consensus on climate change, or the contours of various investigations, it is clear that they desire to confuse and mislead in order to shape facts to their whim.

It’s not always so consequential when the media gets it wrong. When CNN breathlessly highlights its developing story — that an airplane “will struggle to maintain altitude once the fuel tanks are empty” —it gives us room to critique the utility of 24/7 media, but not necessarily a political angle.

But ask yourself: who benefits when the media is afraid to report a simple fact about an investigation with political connotations? The obvious answer, in the NPR example I gave, is that Republicans benefit. They want the President to appear innocent, so every hedge on known facts about illegal activities of those in Trump’s orbit is a gift to the right. Every time a reporter gives equal time to climate change deniers is a gift to the right and a blow to informed discussion in a democracy.

Not only is there a rightward bias, but there is also an establishment bias that goes hand-in-hand. Consider this CNN report about Facebook’s “pivot to privacy”, in which CEO Zuckerberg is credited with “changing his tune somewhat”. To the extent to which that article highlights “problems” with this, they take Zuckerberg at face-value and start to wonder if it will be harder to clamp down on fake news in the news feed if there’s more privacy. That is a total misunderstanding of what was being proposed; a more careful reading of the situation was done by numerous outlets, resulting in headlines such as this one in The Intercept: “Mark Zuckerberg Is Trying to Play You — Again.” They correctly point out the only change actually mentioned pertained only to instant messages, not to the news feed that CNN was talking about, and even that had a vague promise to happen “over the next few years.” Who benefited from CNN’s failure to read a press release closely? The established powers — Facebook.

Pay attention to the media and you’ll notice that journalists trip all over themselves to report a new dot in a story, but they run away scared from being the first to connect the dots. Much has been written about the “media narrative,” often critical, with good reason. Back in November of 2018, an excellent article on “The Ubearable Rightness of Seth Abramson” covered one particular case in delightful detail.

Journalists trip all over themselves to report a new dot in a story, but they run away scared from being the first to connect the dots.

Seth Abramson himself wrote, “Trump-Russia is too complex to report. We need a new kind of journalism.” He argues the culprit is not laziness, but rather that “archive of prior relevant reporting that any reporter could review before they publish their own research is now so large and far-flung that more and more articles are frustratingly incomplete or even accidentally erroneous than was the case when there were fewer media outlets, a smaller and more readily navigable archive of past reporting for reporters to sift through, and a less internationalized media landscape.” Whether laziness or not, the effect is the same: a failure to properly contextualize facts leading to misrepresented or outright wrong outcomes that, at present, have a distinct bias towards right-wing and establishment interests.

Yes, the many scandals in Trumpland are extraordinarily complex, and in this age of shrinking newsroom budgets, it’s no wonder that reporters have trouble keeping up. Highly-paid executives like Zuckerberg and politicians in Congress have years of practice with obfuscation, and it takes skill to find the truth (if there even is any) behind a corporate press release or political talking point. One would hope, though, that reporters would be less quick to opine if they lack those skills or the necessary time to dig in.

There’s not just laziness; there’s also, no doubt, a confusion about what it means to be a balanced journalist. It is clear that there are two sides to a debate over, say, whether to give a state’s lottery money to the elementary schools or the universities. When there is the appearance of a political debate over facts, shouldn’t that also receive equal time for each side? I argue no. In fact, politicians making claims that contradict establish fact should be exposed by journalists, not covered by them.

And some of it is, no doubt, fear. Fear that if they come out and say “yes, this implicates Stone with Russian hacking” that the Fox News crowd will attack them as biased. Of course this will happen, but that attack will be wrong. The right has done an excellent job of convincing both reporters and the public that there’s a big left-leaning bias that needs to be corrected, by yelling about it every time a fact is mentioned that they don’t like. The unfortunate result is that the fact-leaning bias in the media is being whittled away.

Politicians making claims that contradict establish fact should be exposed by journalists, not covered by them. The fact-leaning bias in the media is being whittled away.

Regardless of the cause, media organizations and their reporters need to be cognizant of the biases actors of all stripes wish them to display, and refuse to play along. They need to be cognizant of the demands they put on their own reporters, and give them space to understand the context of a story before explaining it. They need to stand up to those that try to diminish facts, to those that would like them to be uninformed.

A world in which reporters know the context of their stories and boldly state facts as facts, come what may, is a world in which reporters strengthen the earth’s democracies. And, by extension, its people.

Review of Secure, Privacy-Respecting Email Services

Freedom, Online Life, Technology,

I’ve been hosting my own email for several decades now. Even before I had access to a dedicated Internet link, I had email via dialup UUCP (and, before that, a FidoNet gateway).

But self-hosting email is becoming increasingly difficult. The time required to maintain spam and virus filters, SPF/DKIM settings, etc. just grows. The importance of email also is increasing. Although my own email has been extremely reliable, it is still running on a single server somewhere and therefore I could stand to have a lot of trouble if it went down while I was unable to fix it

Email with Pretty Good Privacy & Security

(Yes, this heading is a pun.)

There’s a lot of important stuff linked to emails. Family photos. Password resets for banks, social media sites, chat sites, photo storage sites, etc. Shopping histories. In a lot of cases, if your email was compromised, it wouldn’t be all that hard to next compromise your bank account, buy stuff with your Amazon account, hijack your Netflix, etc. There are lots of good resources about why privacy matters; here’s one informative video even if you think you have “nothing to hide”.

There is often a tradeoff between security and usability. A very secure system would be airgapped; you’d always compose your messages and use your secret keys on a system that has no Internet access and never will. Such a system would be quite secure, but not particularly usable.

On the other end of the spectrum are services such as Gmail, which not only make your email available to you, but also to all sorts of other systems within the service that aim to learn about your habits so they can sell this information to advertisers.

This post is about the services in the middle – ones that are usable, can be easily used on mobile devices, and yet make a serious and credible effort to provide better security and privacy than the “big services” run by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Some elements of trust are inherent here; for instance, that the description of the technical nuances of the provider’s services are accurate. (Elements of trust are present in any system; whether your firmware, binaries, etc. are trustworthy.) I used the list at Privacy Tools as a guide to what providers to investigate, supplemented by searches and NoMoreGoogle.

It so happens that most of these services integrate PGP in some way. PGP has long been one of the better ways to have secure communication via email, but it is not always easy for beginners to use. These services make it transparent to a certain degree. None of them are as good as a dedicated client on an airgapped machine, but then again, such a setup isn’t very practical for everyday use. These services give you something better — pretty good, even — but of course not perfect. All of these pay at least lip service to Open Source, some of them actually publishing source for some of their components, but none are fully open.

I pay particular attention to how they handle exchanges with people that do not have PGP, as this kind of communication constitutes the vast majority of my email.

A final comment – if what you really need is an easy and secure way to communicate with one or two people, email itself may not be the right option. Consider Signal.

Protonmail

Protonmail is, in many ways, the gold standard of privacy-respecting email. Every email is stored encrypted in a way that even they can’t see, being decrypted on the client side (using a Javascript PGP implementation or other clients). They definitely seem to be pushing the envelope for security and privacy; they keep no IP logs, don’t require any personal information to set up an account, and go into quite a lot of detail about how your keys are protected.

A side effect of this is that you can’t just access your email with any mail reader. Since the decryption is done on the client side, you pretty much have to use a Protonmail client. They provide clients for iOS and Android, the Web interface, and a “bridge” that exposes IMAP and SMTP ports to localhost and lets you connect a traditional mail client to the system. The bridge, in this case, handles the decryption for you. The bridge works really well and supports Windows, Mac, and Linux, though it is closed source. (The source for the Linux bridge has been “coming soon” for awhile now.) Protonmail provides very good support for bringing your own domain, and in my testing this worked flawlessly. It supports Sieve-based filters, which can also act on envelope recipients (yes!) The web interface is sleek, very well done, tightly integrated, and just generally exceptionally easy to use and just works.

Unfortunately, the mobile clients get the job done for only light use. My opinion: they’re bad. Really bad. For instance:

  • There’s no way to change the sort order on a mail folder
  • The Android client has an option to automatically download all message bodies. The iOS client lacks this option, but no matter; it doesn’t work on Android anyhow.
  • They’re almost completely unusable offline. You can compose a brand new message but that’s it.

There are some other drawbacks. For one, they don’t actually encrypt mail metadata, headers, or subject lines (though this is common to all of the solutions here, Protonmail’s marketing glosses over this). They also seem to have a lot of problems with overly-aggressive systems blocking people’s accounts: here’s a report from 2017, and I’ve seen more recent ones from people that had paid, but then had the account disabled. Apparently protonmail is used by scammers a fair bit and this is a side-effect of offering free, highly secure accounts – some of their deactivations have been legitimate. Nevertheless, it makes me nervous, especially given the high number of reports of this on reddit.

Unfortunately, Proton seems more focused on new products than on fixing these issues. They’ve been long-simmering in the community but what they talk about is more about their upcoming new products.

Protonmail’s terms of service include both a disclaimer that it’s as-is and an SLA, as well as an indemnification clause. Update 2019-03-04: Protonmail’s privacy policy states they use Matomo analytics, that they don’t record your login IP address by default (but IP logs might be kept if you enable it or if they suspect spamming, etc), collect mobile app analytics, IP addresses on incoming messages, etc. Data is retained “indefinitely” for active accounts and for 14 days after account deletion for closed accounts.

Support: email ticket only

Pricing: $4/mo if paid annually; includes 5GB storage, 5 aliases, and 1 custom domain

Location: Switzerland

MFA: TOTP only

Plus address extensions: yes

Transparency report: yes

Mailfence

Mailfence is often mentioned in the same sentence as ProtonMail. They also aim to be a privacy-respecting, secure email solution.

While it is quite possible they use something like LUKS to encrypt data at rest (safeguarding it from a stolen hard drive), unlike ProtonMail, Mailfence does have access to the full content of any plaintext messages sent or received by your account. Mailfence integrates PGP into the Web interface, claiming end-to-end encryption with a “zero-knowledge environment” using, of all things, the same openpgpjs library that is maintained by ProtonMail. While ProtonMail offers a detailed description of key management, I haven’t been able to find this with Mailfence – other than that the private key is stored encrypted on their servers and is protected by a separate passphrase from the login. If we assume the private key is decrypted on the client side, then for PGP-protected communications, the level of security is similar to ProtonMail. With Mailfence, decrypting these messages is a separate operation, while with ProtonMail it happens automatically once logged in. (Update 2019-03-01: Mailfence emailed me, pointing to their document on key storage – it is AES-256 encrypted by the client and stored on the server. They also passed along a link describing their PGP keystore. They also said they plan to work on a feature th encrypt plain text messages.)

While technical measures are part of the story, business policies are another, and Mailfence does seem to have some pretty good policies in place.

In experimenting with it, I found that Mailfence’s filters don’t support filtering based on the envelope recipient, which limits the utility of its aliases since BCC and the like won’t filter properly. A workaround might be possible via the IMAP connection filtering based on Received: headers, but that is somewhat ugly.

Mailfence also supports “secure” documents (word processor, spreadsheet, etc), WebDAV file storage, contacts, and calendars. There is no detail on what makes it “secure” – is it just that it uses TLS or is there something more? I note that the online document editor goes to a URL under writer.zoho.com, so this implies some sort of leakage to me and a possible violation of their “no third-party access to your data” claim. (Update 2019-03-01: Mailfence emailed me to point out that, while it’s not disclosed on the page I liked to, it is disclosed on their blog, and that since I evaluated it, they added a popup warning in the application before sending the documents to Zoho.)

Mailfence supports POP, IMAP, SMTP, and — interestingly — Exchange ActiveSync access to their services. I tested ActiveSync on my Android device, and it appeared to work exactly as planned. This gives a lot of client flexibility and very nice options for calendar and contact sync (*DAV is also supported).

Mailfence’s terms of use is fairly reasonable, though it also includes an indemnification clause. It makes no particular uptime promises. Update 2019-03-04: Per their privacy policy, Mailfence logs IP addresses and use Matomo analytics on the website but not within the application. Deleted messages and documents are retained for 45 days. The policy does not specify retention for logs.

Support: email ticket or business-hours phone support for paying customers

Pricing: EUR 2.50/mo paid annually, includes 5GB storage, 10 aliases, and 1 custom domain

Location: Belgium

MFA: TOTP only

Plus address extensions: Yes

Transparency report: Yes

Mailbox.org

Mailbox.org has been in the hosting business for a long time, and also has a privacy emphasis. Their security is conceptually similar to that of Mailfence. They offer two web-based ways of dealing with PGP: OX Guard and Mailvelope. Mailvelope is a browser extension that does all encryption and decryption on the client side, similar to Mailfence and ProtonMail. OX Guard is part of the Open-Xchange package which mailbox.org uses. It stores the encryption keys on the server, protected by a separate key passphrase, but all encryption and decryption is done server-side. Mailbox’s KB articles on this makes it quite clear and spell out the tradeoffs. The basic upshot is that messages you receive in plaintext will still be theoretically visible to the service itself.

Mailbox.org offers another interesting feature: automatic PGP-encryption of any incoming email that isn’t already encrypted. This encrypts everything inbound. If accessed using Mailvelope or some other external client, it provides equivalent security to ProtonMail. (OX Guard is a little different since the decryption happens server-side.)

They also offer you an @secure.mailbox.org email address that will reject any incoming mail that isn’t properly secured by TLS. You can also send from that address, which will fail to send unless the outgoing connection is properly secured as well. This is one of the more interesting approaches to dealing with the non-PGP-using public. Even if you don’t use that, if you compose in their web interface, you get immediate feedback about the TLS that will be used. It’s not end-to-end, but it’s better than nothing. Mailfence and Protonmail both offer an “secure email” that basically emails a link to a recipient, that links back to their server and requires the recipient to enter a password that was presumably exchanged out of band. Mailbox Guard will automatically go this route when you attempt to send email to someone for whom the PGP keys weren’t known, but goes a step further and invites them to reply there or set up their PGP keys.

Mailbox.org runs Open-Xchange, a semi-Open Source web-based office suite. As such, it also offers calendar, contacts, documents, task lists, IMAP/SMTP/POP, ActiveSync, and so forth. Their KB specifically spells out that things like the calendar are not encrypted with PGP. The filtering does the right thing with envelope recipients.

Mailbox.org has an amazingly comprehensive set of options, a massive knowledge base, even a user forum. Some of the settings I found to be interesting, besides the ones already mentioned, include:

  • Spam settings: greylisting on or off, RBL use, executable file attachment blocking, etc.
  • Restoring email from a backup
  • Disposable addresses (automatically deleted after 30 days)
  • A “catch-all” alias, that just counts as one of your regular aliases, and applies to all usernames under a domain not otherwise aliased.

I know Protonmail has frequent third-party security audits; I haven’t seen any mention of this on the mailbox.org site. However, it looks probable that less of their code was written in house, and it may have been audited without a mention.

Overall, I’ve been pretty impressed with them. They give details on EVERYTHING. It’s the geeky sort of comprehensive, professional solution I’d like. I wish it would have full end-to-end transparent encryption like ProtonMail, but honestly what they’re doing is more practical and useful to a lot of folks.

Mailbox has a reasonable T&C (though it does include an indemnity clause as many others do) and a thorough data protection and privacy policy. Some providers don’t log IP addresses at all; mailbox.org does, but destroys them after 4 days. (Update 2019-03-04: Discovered that all of the providers reviewed may do this at times; updated the other reviews and removed incorrect text; mailbox.org’s is actually one of the better policies) mailbox.org goes into a lot more detail than others, and also explicitly supports things such as Tor for greater anonymity.

Support: email ticket (phone for business-level customers)

Pricing: EUR 1/mo for 2GB storage and 3 aliases; EUR 2.50/mo for 5GB storage and 25 aliases. Expansions possible (for instance, 25GB storage costs a total of EUR 3.50/mo)

Location: Germany

MFA: Yubikey, OATH, TOTP, HOTP, MOTP (web interface only)

Plus address extensions: Yes

Transparency Report: Yes

Startmail

Startmail is a service from the people behind the privacy-respecting search engine Startpage. There is not a lot of information about the technical implementation of Startmail, with the exception of a technical white paper from 2016. It is unclear if this white paper remains accurate, but this review will assume it is. There are also some articles in the knowledge base.

I was unable to fully review Startmail, because the free trial is quite limited (doesn’t even support IMAP) and anything past that level requires an up-front payment of $60. While I paid a few dollars for a month’s real account elsewhere, this was rather too much for a few paragraphs’ review.

However, from the trial, it appears to have a feature set roughly akin to Mailfence. Its mail filters are actually more limited, and it’s mail only: no documents, calendars, etc.

Startmail a somewhat unique setup, in which a person’s mail, PGP keys, etc. are stored in a “vault” which turns out to be a LUKS-encrypted volume. This vault is opened when a person logs in and closed when they log out, and controlled by a derivative of their password. On the one hand, this provides an even stronger level of security than Protonmail (since headers are also encrypted). On the other hand, when the vault is “open” – when one must presume it is quite frequently for an account being polled by IMAP – it is no better than anything else.

They explicitly state that they have not had a third-party audit.

Support: ticket only

Pricing: $60/yr ($5/mo), must be paid as an entire year up-front

Location: Netherlands

MFA: TOTP only

Plus address extensions: unknown

Transparency report: no

Not Reviewed

Some other frequently-used providers I didn’t review carefully:

  • posteo.de: encrypts your mail using a dovecot extension that decrypts it using a derivation of your password when you connect. Something better than nothing but less than Protonmail. Didn’t evaluate because it didn’t support my own domain.
  • Tutanota: Seems to have a security posture similar to ProtonMail, but has no IMAP support at all. If I can’t use emacs to read my mail, I’m not going to bother.

Conclusions

The level of security represented by Protonmail was quite appealing to me. I wish that the service itself was more usable. It looks like an excellent special-needs service, but just isn’t quite there yet as a main mail account for people that have a lot of mail.

I am likely to pursue mailbox.org some more, as although it isn’t as strong as Protonmail when it comes to privacy, it is still pretty good and is amazing on usability and flexibility.

A Final Word on Trust

Trust is a big part of everything going on here. For instance, if you use ProtonMail, where does trust come into play? Well, you trust that they aren’t serving you malicious JavaScript that captures your password and sends it to them out of band. You trust that your browser provides a secure environment for JavaScript and doesn’t have leakage. Or if you use mailbox.org, you trust that the server is providing a secure environment and that when you supply your password for the PGP key, it’s used only for that. ProtonMail will tell you how great it is to have this code client-side. Startmail will tell you how bad Javascript in a browser is for doing things related to security. Both make good, valid points.

To be absolutely sure, it is not possible or practical for any person to verify every component in their stack on every use. Different approaches have different trust models. The very best is still standalone applications.

The providers reviewed here raise the average level of privacy and security on the Internet, and do it by making it easier for the average user. That alone is a good thing and worthy of support. None of them can solve every problem, but all of them are a step up from the standard, which is almost no security at all.

Making a difference

Politics

Every day, ask yourself this question: What one thing can I do today that will make this democracy stronger and honor and support its institutions? It doesn’t have to be a big thing. And it probably won’t shake the Earth. The aggregation of them will shake the Earth.

– Benjamin Wittes

I have written some over the past year or two about the dangers facing the country. I have become increasingly alarmed about the state of it. And that Benjamin Wittes quote, along with the terrible tragedy, spurred me to action. Among other things, I did two things I never have done before:

I registered to protest on June 30.

I volunteered to do phone banking with SwingLeft.

And I changed my voter registration from independent to Republican.

No, I have not gone insane. The reason for the latter is that here in Kansas, the Democrats rarely field candidates for most offices. The real action happens in the Republican primary. So if I can vote in that primary, I can have a voice in keeping the crazy out of office. It’s not much, but it’s something.

Today we witnessed, hopefully, the first victory in our battle against the abusive practices happening to children at the southern border. Donald Trump caved, and in so doing, implicitly admitted the lies he and his administration have been telling about the situation. This only happened because enough people thought like Wittes: “I am small, but I can do SOMETHING.” When I called the three Washington offices of my senators and representatives — far-right Republicans all — it was apparent that I was by no means the first to give them an earful about this, and that they were changing their tone because of what they heard. Mind you, they hadn’t taken any ACTION yet, but the calls mattered. The reporting mattered. The attention mattered.

I am going to keep doing what little bit I can. I hope everyone else will too. Let us shake the Earth.

The downfall of… Trump or Democracy?

Freedom, Politics

The future of the United States as a democracy is at risk. That’s plenty scary. More scary is that many Americans know this, but don’t care. And even more astonishing is that this same thing happened 45 years ago.

I remember it clearly. January 30, just a couple weeks ago. On that day, we had the news that FBI deputy director McCabe — a frequent target of apparently-baseless Trump criticism — had been pushed out. The Trump administration refused to enforce the bipartisan set of additional sanctions on Russia. And the House Intelligence Committee voted on party lines to release what we all knew then, and since have seen confirmed, was a memo filled with errors designed to smear people investigating the president, but which nonetheless contained enough classified material to cause an almighty kerfuffle in Washington.

I told my wife that evening, “I think today will be remembered as a turning point. Either to the downfall of Trump, or the downfall of our democracy, but I don’t know which.”

I have not written much about this scandal, because so many quality words have already been written. But it is time to add something.

I was interested in Watergate years ago. Back in middle school, I read All the President’s Men. I wondered what it must have been like to live through those events — corruption at the highest level of government, dirty tricks, not knowing how it would play out. I wished I could have experienced it.

A couple of decades later, I have got my wish and I am not amused. After all:

“If these allegations prove to be true, what they were seeking to steal was not the jewels, money or other property of American citizens, but something much more valuable — their most precious heritage, the right to vote in a free election…

If the allegations… are substantiated, there has been a very serious subversion of the integrity of the electoral process, and the committee will be obliged to consider the manner in which such a subversion affects the continued existence of this nation as a representative democracy, and how, if we are to survive, such subversions may be prevented in the future.”

Sen. Sam Ervin Jr, May 17, 1973

That statement from 45 years ago captures accurately my contemporary fears. If foreign interference in our elections is not only tolerated but embraced, where does that leave us? Are we really a republic anymore?

I have been diving back into Watergate. In One Man Against The World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon, written by Tim Weiner in 2015, he dives into the Nixon story in unprecedented detail, thanks to the release of many more files from that time. In his very first page, he writes:

[Nixon] made war in pursuit of peace. He committed crimes in the name of the law. He tore the country apart while trying to unite it. He sabotaged his presidency by violating the Constitution. He destroyed himself and damaged the nation through deliberate acts of folly…

He practiced geopolitics without subtlety; he preferred subterfuge and brutality. He dropped bombs and napalm without remorse; he believed they delivered a political message beyond flood and fire. Hr charted the course of the war without a strategy; he delivered victory to his adversaries.

His gravest decisions undermined his allies abroad. His grandest delusions armed his enemies at home…

The truth was not in him; secrecy and deception were his touchstones.

That these words describe another American president, one that I’m sure Weiner had not foreseen, is jarring. The parallels between Nixon and Trump in the pages of Weiner’s book are so strong that one sometimes wonders if Weiner has a more accurate story of Trump than Wolff got – and also if the pages of his book let us see what’s in store for us this year.

Today I started listening to the excellent podcast Slow Burn. If you have time for nothing else, listen to episode 5: True Believers. It discusses the politicization of the Senate Watergate committee, and more ominously, the efforts of reports to understand the people that still supported Nixon — despite all the damning testimony already out there.

Gail Sheehy went to a bar where Nixon supporters gathered, wanting to get their reaction to the Watergate hearings. The supporters didn’t want to watch. They thought the hearings were just an attempt by liberals to take down Nixon. Sheehy found the president’s people to be “angry, demoralized, and disconcertingly comfortable with the idea of a police state run by Richard Nixon.”

These guys felt they were nobodies… except Richard Nixon gave them an identity. He was a tough guy who was “going to get rid of all those anti-war people, anarchists, terrorists… the people that were tearing down our country!”

Art Buchwald’s tongue-in-cheek handy excuses for Nixon backers seems to be copied almost verbatim by Fox News (substitute Hillary’s emails for Chappaquiddick).

And what happened to the scum of Richard Nixon’s era? Yes, some went to jail, but not all.

  • Steve King, one of Nixon’s henchmen that kidnapped Martha Mitchell (wife of Attorney General and Nixon henchman John Mitchell) for a week to keep her from spilling the beans on Watergate, beat her up, and had her drugged — well he was appointed by Trump to be ambassador to the Czech Republic and confirmed by the Senate.
  • The man that said that the Watergate burglars were “not criminal at heart” because “their only aim was to re-elect the president” later got elected president himself, and pardoned one of the burglars. (Ronald Reagan)
  • The man that said “just let the president do his job!” was also elected president (George H. W. Bush)
  • The man that finally carried out Nixon’s order to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox was nominated to the Supreme Court, but his nomination was blocked in the Senate. (Robert Bork) He was, however, on the United States Court of Appeals for 6 years.
  • And in an odd conspiracy-laden introduction to a reprint of a youth’s history book on Watergate, none other than Roger Stone, wrapped up in Trump’s shenanigans, was trying to defend Nixon. Oh, and he was a business partner with Paul Manafort and lobbyist for Ferdinand Marcos.

One comfort from all of this is the knowledge that we had been there before. We had lived through an era of great progress in civil rights, and right after that elected a dictatorial crook president. We survived the president’s fervent supporters refusing to believe overwhelming evidence of his crookedness. We survived.

And yet, that is no guarantee. After all, as John Dean put it, Nixon “might have survived if there’d been a Fox News.”

Parsing the GOP’s Health Insurance Statistics

Politics

There has been a lot of noise lately about the GOP health care plan (AHCA) and the differences to the current plan (ACA or Obamacare). A lot of statistics are being misinterpreted.

The New York Times has an excellent analysis of some of this. But to pick it apart, I want to highlight a few things:

Many Republicans are touting the CBO’s estimate that, some years out, premiums will be 10% lower under their plan than under the ACA. However, this carries with it a lot of misleading information.

First of all, many are spinning this as if costs would go down. That’s not the case. The premiums would still rise — they would just have risen less by the end of the period than under ACA. That also ignores the immediate spike and throwing millions out of the insurance marketplace altogether.

Now then, where does this 10% number come from? First of all, you have to understand the older people are substantially more expensive to the health system, and therefore more expensive to insure. ACA limited the price differential from the youngest to the oldest people, which meant that in effect some young people were subsidizing older ones on the individual market. The GOP plan removes that limit. Combined with other changes in subsidies and tax credits, this dramatically increases the cost to older people. For instance, the New York Times article cites a CBO estimate that “the price an average 64-year-old earning $26,500 would need to pay after using a subsidy would increase from $1,700 under Obamacare to $14,600 under the Republican plan.”

They further conclude that these exceptionally high rates would be so unaffordable to older people that the older people will simply stop buying insurance on the individual market. This means that the overall risk pool of people in that market is healthier, and therefore the average price is lower.

So, to sum up: the reason that insurance premiums under the GOP plan will rise at a slightly slower rate long-term is that the higher-risk people will be unable to afford insurance in the first place, leaving only the cheaper people to buy in.

What is happening to America?

Politics

I still remember vividly my first visit to Europe, back in 2010. I had just barely gotten off a plane in Hamburg and on to a bus to Lubeck, and struck up a conversation with a friendly, well-educated German classical musician next to me. We soon started to discuss politics and religion. Over the course of the conversation, in response to his questions, I explained I had twice voted against George W. Bush, that I opposed the war in Iraq for many reasons, that I did thought there was an ethical imperative to work to defeat climate change, that I viewed health care as an important ethical and religious issue, that I thought evolution was well-established, and that I am a Christian.

Finally, without any hint of insult intended, and rather a lot of surprise written all over his face, he said:

“Wow. You’re an American, and a Christian, and you’re so…. normal!”

This, it seems to me, has a lot to do with Trump.

Ouch

It felt like a punch to the gut. The day after the election, having known that a man that appeared to stand for everything that honorable people are against won the election, like people all around the world, I was trying to make sense of “how could this happen?” As I’ve watched since, as he stacks government with wealthy cronies with records nearly as colorful as his own, it is easy to feel even more depressed.

Based on how Trump spoke and acted, it would be easy to conclude that the “deplorables” won the day – that he was elected by a contingent of sexists or racists ascendent in power.

But that would be too simple an explanation. This is, after all, the same country that elected Barack Obama twice. There are a many people that voted twice for a black man, and then for Trump. Why? Racism, while doubtless a factor, can’t explain it all.

How Trump could happen

Russ Allbery made some excellent points recently:

[Many Americans are] hurt, and they’re scared, and they feel like a lot of the United States just slammed the door in their faces.”

The status quo is not working for people.

Technocratic government by political elites is not working for people. Business as usual is not working for people. Minor tweaks to increasingly arcane systems is not working for people. People are feeling lost in bureaucracy, disaffected by elections that do not present a clear alternate vision, and depressed by a slow slide into increasingly dismal circumstances.

Government is not doing what we want it to do for us. And people are getting left behind. The left in the United States (of which I’m part) has for many years been very concerned about the way blacks and other racial minorities are systematically pushed to the margins of our economy, and how women are pushed out of leadership roles. Those problems are real. But the loss of jobs in the industrial heartland, the inability of a white, rural, working-class man to support his family the way his father supported him, the collapse of once-vibrant communities into poverty and despair: those problems are real too.

The status quo is not working for anyone except for a few lucky, highly-educated people on the coasts. People, honestly, like me, and like many of the other (primarily white and male) people who work in tech. We are one of the few beneficiaries of a system that is failing the vast majority of people in this country.

Russ is, of course, right. The Democrats have been either complicit in policies damaging to many, or ineffective in preventing them. They have often appeared unconcerned with the plight of people outside cities (even if that wasn’t really the case). And it goes deeper.

When’s the last time you visited Kansas?

I live in Kansas. The nearest paved road is about a 3-mile drive from my home. The nearest town, population 600, is a 6-mile drive. My governor — whom I did not vote for — cut taxes on the wealthy so much that our excellent local schools have been struggling for years. But my community is amazing, full of loving and caring people, the sort of people who you know you’ll be living with for 40 years, and so you make sure you get along well with.

I have visited tourist sites in Berlin, enjoyed an opera and a Broadway show in New York, taken a train across the country to Portland, explored San Francisco. I’ve enjoyed all of them. Many rural people do get out and experience the world.

I have been in so many conversations where I try to explain where I live to people that simply cannot fathom it. I have explained how the 18 acres I own is a very small amount where I am. How, yes, I do actually have electricity and Internet. How a bad traffic day is one where I have to wait for three cars to go past before turning onto the paved road. How I occasionally find a bull in my front yard, how I can walk a quarter mile and be at the creek on the edge of my property, how I can get to an airport faster than most New Yorkers and my kids can walk out the front door and play in a spot more peaceful than Central Park, and how all this is way cheaper than a studio apartment in a bad part of San Francisco.

It is rare indeed to see visitors actually traveling to Kansas as a destination. People have no concept of the fact that my mechanic would drop everything and help me get my broken-down car to the shop for no charge, that any number of neighbors or uncles would bring a tractor and come plow the snow off my 1/4-mile driveway out of sheer kindness, that people around here really care for each other in a way you don’t see in a city.

There are people that I know see politics way differently than me, but I know them to be good people. They would also do anything for a person in need, no matter who they are. I may find the people that they vote for to be repugnant, but I cannot say “I’ve looked this person in the eyes and they are nothing but deplorable.”

And so, people in rural areas feel misunderstood. And they are right.

Some perspectives on Trump

As I’ve said, I do find Trump to be deplorable, but not everyone that voted for him is. How, then, do people wind up voting for him?

The New Yorker had an excellent story about a man named Mark Frisbie, owner of a welding and fab shop. The recession had been hard on his business. His wife’s day-care center also closed. Health care was hard to find, and the long, slow decline had spanned politicians of every stripe. Mark and his wife supposedly did everything they were supposed to: they worked hard, were honest, were entrepreneurial, and yet — he had lost his business, his family house, his health coverage, everything. He doesn’t want a handout. He wants to be able to earn a living. Asked who he’d vote for, he said, “Is ‘none of the above’ an option?”

The Washington Post had another insightful article, about a professor from Madison, WI interviewing people in rural areas. She said people would often say: “All the decisions are made in Madison and Milwaukee and nobody’s listening to us. Nobody’s paying attention, nobody’s coming out here and asking us what we think. Decisions are made in the cities, and we have to abide by them.” She pushed back, hard, on the idea that Trump supporters are ignorant, and added that liberals that push that line of thinking are only making the problem worse.

I would agree; seeing all the talk about universities dis-inviting speakers that don’t hew to certain political views doesn’t help either.

A related article talks about the lack of empathy for Trump voters.

And then we have a more recent CNN article: Where Tump support and Obamacare use soar together, explaining in great detail how it can be logical for someone to be on Obamacare but not like it. We can all argue that the Republicans may have as much to do with that as anything, but the problem exists.

And finally, a US News article makes this point:

“His supporters realize he’s a joke. They do not care. They know he’s authoritarian, nationalist, almost un-American, and they love him anyway, because he disrupts a broken political process and beats establishment candidates who’ve long ignored their interests.

When you’re earning $32,000 a year and haven’t had a decent vacation in over a decade, it doesn’t matter who Trump appoints to the U.N., or if he poisons America’s standing in the world, you just want to win again, whoever the victim, whatever the price.

…

According to the Republican Party, the biggest threat to rural America was Islamic terrorism. According to the Democratic Party it was gun violence. In reality it was prescription drug abuse and neither party noticed until it was too late.”

Are we leaving people out?

All this reminded me of reading about Donald Knuth, the famous computer scientist and something of the father of modern computing, writing about his feelings of trepidation about sharing with his university colleagues that he was working on a project related to the Bible. I am concerned about the complaints about “the PC culture”, because I think it is good that people aren’t making racist or anti-semitic jokes in public anymore. But, as some of these articles point out, in many circles, making fun of Christians and conservatives is still one of the accepted targets. Does that really help anything? (And as a Christian that is liberal, have all of you that aren’t Christians so quickly forgotten how churches like the Episcopals blazed the way for marriage equality many years ago already?)

But they don’t get a free pass

I have found a few things, however, absolutely scary. One was an article from December showing that Trump voters actually changed their views on Russia after Trump became the nominee. Another one from just today was a study on how people reacted when showed inauguration crowd photos.

NPR ran a story today as well, on how Trump is treating journalists like China does. Chilling stuff indeed.

Conclusion

So where does this leave us? Heading into uncertain times, for sure, but perhaps — just maybe — with a greater understanding of our neighbors.

Perhaps we will all be able to see past the rhetoric and polarization, and understand that there is something, well, normal about each other. Doing that is going to be the only way we can really take our country back.