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Matthew Green Profile picture
@matthew_d_green
Sep 17, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
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So this indictment is puzzling. It concerns Michael Sussman, a lawyer who organized the collection of DNS data from hosting providers allegedly for political purposes. Many of the companies are anonymized, can we tell who they are? (Thread) context-cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/def…
So we begin with “Internet Company-1”, which is a (major?) DNS resolver. Image
The executive in question (Tech Executive-1) claims to have been offered a position as Hillary Clinton’s cyberczar if she won, so maybe that’s a clue? Image
There are two other Internet companies in here. Internet Company-2 collects DNS data (maybe passively) and Internet Company-3 is maybe a threat Intel company owned by company #2. The executive has ownership interest in all three. Image
In case it isn’t obvious from context, this whole thread is about the Trump-Alfa Bank DNS allegations. Some of these quotes sent between researchers are pretty damning. Image
Overall this is an awful-looking story. The Clinton campaign and sympathetic executives at tech companies ran wild through private DNS data (which apparently has no protections at all) to concoct a narrative, and then dragged university researchers in to help confirm it. Image

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More from @matthew_d_green

Matthew Green Profile picture
Jul 5
I’ve been watching some early 90s movies recently, and being reminded of the privacy expectations we all used to take for granted in a world that basically worked fine. People paying in cash; using telephones; having important conversations in person.
The idea that a corporation might track you routinely (even if just to push you ads) was barely on the radar. The idea that we needed to add that feature to keep us safe, that was laughable. The past is like a foreign country.
Someone asked me to explain why the early cypherpunks were such a weird alliance of pro-privacy hippies and more right wing gun nuts. Well, that’s easy. The cypherpunk folks were an alliance of weirdos. It was a time where most of these ideas didn’t have mainstream support because the mainstream took most privacy for granted and didn’t see the need to think about weird ideas like “digital money that worked like cash” because we all used cash.
Read 5 tweets
Matthew Green Profile picture
Jul 3
I really do think context is important here. Some of these age verification laws are based on good-faith concerns. But a lot of them are really designed to censor big chunks of the Internet, making them less accessible to both kids and adults.
If you’re thinking that some kind of privacy-preserving age verification system is the answer, that’s great! But you need to make sure your goals (easy access for adults, real privacy, no risk of credentials being stolen) actually overlap with the legislators’ goals.
These systems have loads of sharp edges, and even if you do a perfect job you’re already going to chill access to sites that require age verification. But of course *nobody* comes close to getting it right. For example: 404media.co/id-verificatio…
Read 12 tweets
Matthew Green Profile picture
Jun 21
I want to agree with the idea that mass scanning “breaks encryption” but I think the entire question is a category error. Any law that installs surveillance software directly on your phone isn’t “breaking” or “not breaking” encryption, it’s doing exactly what it promises to do.
For decades we (in the west) had no mass surveillance of any communications. Starting in the 2010s some folks came up with the idea of scanning for illicit content like CSAM uploaded in plaintext on servers. (With apparently relatively little effect on the overall problem.) Image
I don’t think many people realize how new and unproven this scanning tech is: they just assume it’s always been there and it works. It really hasn’t: it’s only a few years old, and it doesn’t seem to have any noticeable impact on sharing of CSAM material.
Read 7 tweets
Matthew Green Profile picture
Jun 10
So Apple has introduced a new system called “Private Cloud Compute” that allows your phone to offload complex (typically AI) tasks to specialized secure devices in the cloud. I’m still trying to work out what I think about this. So here’s a thread. 1/
Apple, unlike most other mobile providers, has traditionally done a lot of processing on-device. For example, all of the machine learning and OCR text recognition on Photos is done right on your device. 2/
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The problem is that while modern phone “neural” hardware is improving, it’s not improving fast enough to take advantage of all the crazy features Silicon Valley wants from modern AI, including generative AI and its ilk. This fundamentally requires servers. 3/
Read 22 tweets
Matthew Green Profile picture
May 28
Some folks are discussing what it means to be a “secure encrypted messaging app.” I think a lot of this discussion is shallow and in bad faith, but let’s talk about it a bit. Here’s a thread. 1/
First: the most critical element that (good) secure messengers protect is the content of your conversations in flight. This is usually done with end-to-end encryption. Messengers like Signal, WhatsApp, Matrix etc. encrypt this data using keys that only the end-devices know. 2/
Encrypting the content of your conversations, preferably by default, is “table stakes.” It isn’t perfect, but it’s required for a messenger even to flirt with the word “secure.” But security and privacy are hard, deep problems. Solving encrypted messaging is just the start. 3/
Read 15 tweets
Matthew Green Profile picture
May 23
Several people have suggested that the EU’s mandatory chat scanning proposal was dead. In fact it seems that Belgium has resurrected it in a “compromise” and many EU member states are positive. There’s a real chance this becomes law. dropbox.com/scl/fi/9w611f2…


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The basic idea of this proposal is to scan private (and encrypted) messages for child sexual abuse material. This now means just images and videos. Previous versions also included text and audio, but the new proposal has for the moment set that aside, because it was too creepy. Image
Previous versions of this idea ran into opposition from some EU member states. Apparently these modest changes have been enough to bring France and Poland around. Because “compromise”. Image
Read 11 tweets

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