At 08:43 PM 8/30/2013, grarpamp wrote:

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On 8/30/13, Jon Callas wrote: What we're learning from Snowden is that they're doing traffic analysis -- analyzing movements, social graphs, and so on and so forth. The irony here is that this tells us that the crypto works.

Are we sure? This seems to tell us they are doing traffic analysis and so forth. It doesn't seem to say much about cryptanalytic capabilities. For all we know they could have all the crypto in the bag but need analysis to identify talkers due to people being exceedingly careful about the message content.

"Blue hen rides over the book on the left side when the sun is low. Do you copy?"

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Received:, Message-ID:, etc. Those are tricky. They're not really part of SMTP, they're part of

If they know that Alice and Bob have been sending mail to each other, that's often more valuable than the traffic itself. Certainly for the model that says they're tracking two or three degrees of separation from Alice the Foreigner, with a court letting them demand that ISPs hand over any plaintext they have, though you can avoid some of that by using remailers. the email message. A "pen register" style of wiretapping the envelope gets you the SMTP headers TO and FROM and the IP addresses and email options, but at least if you're using SMTP encryption you won't get the message headers. On the other hand, if you're just using PGP or SMIME on the message body, you do get them, so that's not going to help alice@gmail.com much.