----- Forwarded message from Mark van Walraven <mvw@wave.co.nz> ----- Date: Sun, 8 Sep 2013 17:09:32 +1200 From: Mark van Walraven <mvw@wave.co.nz> To: linux-elitists@zgp.org Subject: Re: [linux-elitists] Surveillance User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) On Sat, Sep 07, 2013 at 09:14:31PM -0700, Greg KH wrote:

But what else needs to be worked on? What gaps do people feel we have that are cauing problems that we can solve with technological measures, not just legal ones?

How can I trust my hardware and the firmware therein? If it's so hard to check that Huawei haven't embedded snooping mechanisms in the chips and use covert channels to export the data, how can I trust Intel or AMD or Broadcom or Marvell? Covert channels can be subtle and during the cold war the intelligence agencies did some amazing work in detecting data embedded in what seemed to noise. Is there some way to crowd-source counter-espionage? Can we automate "many eyes" to detect snooping? Open hardware with quartz windows on the IC packages would be nice, but then I'd still want a way to validate that what I had was the same as what some transparent authority had declared to be a clean implementation. Difficult with commonly-available equipment, but perhaps it could be common enough to make spy(hard)ware difficult and risky to deploy. My life and work are undoubtedly painfully uninteresting to any intelligence service, but the disrespect for my privacy rankles me; I would pay significantly extra for a clean platform. Cheers, Mark. _______________________________________________ Do not Cc: anyone else on mail sent to this list. The list server is set for maximum one recipient. linux-elitists mailing list linux-elitists@zgp.org http://zgp.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linux-elitists ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5