On Thu, Feb 07, 2013 at 02:11:22AM -0700, Christopher Soghoian wrote:

It is clear that you seem to have developed a foaming-in-the-mouth, irrational hate of Silent Circle. As such, anyone who fails to denounce Phil Zimmermann as the great Satan is, in your eyes, some kind of corrupt shill.

Silent Circle has some significant credibility gaps. They repeatedly claimed, and AFAIK continue to claim, to be "open source", but the source isn't even available for inspection under restrictive license, much less actually open source per OSI or DFSG or common sense guidelines. They haven't justified or explained this gap in any of their statements I've seen. They're trading very heavily on the excellent pedigrees of their principals, while making outlandish and unsupported claims to credulous mainstream journalists. Your participation in their marketing interviews makes you complicit in this problematic enterprise, Chris. I think it's incredibly unfair of you to attack Nadim for pointing out the flaws in this system without addressing your role in those flaws. We all want privacy and security for users. Silent Circle's misappropriation of the "open source" label and hagiographic mainstream press treatment in advance of actual public review, abetted by a wide variety of experts and public voices, is deeply problematic for the liberation technology community's role in civil society. Silent Circle may be an excellent privacy app. It might not have any significant security problems. It might even do a good job of mitigating important platform-based attacks and supporting important new use cases (the "burn after reading" feature). When it's actually open source I'll take a look and if it is good, I'll recommend it to users. Until that open review happens, I think it's inappropriate for voices in our community to commend or recommend such a proprietary system. Each person makes their own choices, of course, and nobody should base their actions solely on what *I* think is right, but I hope you can hear my concerns and consider the outcomes of your actions. -andy -- Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password at: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE