[LINK] GCHQ Forced Secure Email Service PrivateSky to Shut Down

[Glen Turner]

On 14/12/2013, at 9:19 AM, Karl Auer wrote:

> On Sat, 2013-12-14 at 09:16 +1100, Kim Holburn wrote:
>> http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/529392/20131211/gchq-forced-privatesky-secure-email-service-offline.htm
>>> "We are business people but we believe in privacy, internet freedom and responsible government."
> 
> The reason they had to give up, and the reason they were a viable target
> in the first place, was that they centralised control in a single
> entity. If there were a distributed mechanism in place (think Tor),
> these problems would go away.
> 
> I don't know what that mechanism is - but it's the answer :-)

The problem with distributed mechanisms is that you don't know who owns them. It's simple enough to NSA to own enough of them to have a high probability of collecting the metadata it desires.

-glen