[Cryptography] Is Surespot the Latest Crypto War Victim?

Henry Baker hbaker1 at pipeline.com
Wed Jun 17 20:38:32 EDT 2015


FYI -- Are warrant canaries going to be part of mainstream crypto protocols from now on?  Perhaps a mathematical analysis of warrant canaries is in order?

http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/06/17/1941220/is-surespot-the-latest-crypto-war-victim

Is Surespot the Latest Crypto War Victim?

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday June 17, 2015 @05:31PM

from the lets-see-what-you're-doing dept.

George Maschke writes:

Patrick G. Eddington writes in a Christian Science Monitor op-ed about indications that the government may be snooping on users of Surespot, a free and open source encrypted messaging app for Android and iOS.

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/Passcode-Voices/2015/0617/Opinion-Is-Surespot-the-latest-cryptowar-victim

https://www.surespot.me/

https://github.com/surespot

Such users include, but are hardly limited to, Islamic State militants.

He writes in the piece: "Has encrypted chat service Surespot been compromised by the US government?

Surespot user and former Army intelligence officer George Maschke recently published a provocative theory suggesting the answer is yes.

Mr. Maschke’s key pieces of evidence are intriguing.

In May 2014, he e-mailed 2Fours LLC, which is Surespot’s parent company, asking whether the company had ever received a National Security Letter (NSL), a court order to provide information, or other government request to cooperate in an investigation.

He was assured in writing that 2Fours had received no such requests.

That changed in November 2014, when Surespot’s founder, Adam Patacchiola, told Maschke via e-mail that 'we have received an e-mail asking us how to submit a subpoena to us which we haven’t received yet.'"



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