| "Some minds are like concrete - thoroughly mixed and permanently set" - Benjamin Franklyn or Karl Marx or John Lennon (or insert any other name you like) We're hoping to get code up onto the git today, maybe tomorrow. The guy who's volunteered to do it spent the evening at a party then the night at the New Cross library occupation. He's just gone to bed. I'm sure you'll find something to moan about in the code when you see it - i read negativity towards the entire project from your very first paragraph. When you trawl through the code you'll note that no personal identifiers are stored anywhere. We had to finish the proof of concept in a rush so you'll also see function stubs that do nothing, inconsistencies in APIs, poorly commented code and incredible inefficiencies. These flag some of the areas of future development. But you'll also note that the unfinished or inefficient bits are to do with user functionality. Anything to do with security is not compromised. But I'm not sure any of this is really relevant. The key question is: how sensitive is the data? Sure, we don't encrypt the SMS messages we send to old phones - if we did the users couldn't read them so it would be pointless sending them in the first place. But the content of those messages is innocent. Likewise we don't encrypt tweets (in or out). What would be the point? If you lose the original then I'm sure our friends at Cheltenham will have a backup.... We can do nothing about the telcos using their geolocation features to track the whereabouts of phones. But that's really not a Sukey issue - cos the same issues apply to anyone using a mobile phone for any purpose at any dem. You could of course advocate people leave their own fones at home and buy a disposable and untraceable (yeah, right!) phone just for the dem. Good luck with that one. You "continue to urge nobody to trust a protest tool until these concerns are properly addressed" - yet I'm still to see a concise description of what these purported concerns are. A cynical man might say: "I would urge nobody to take any notice of a self important pompous windbag who seems to want to obstruct something he clearly doesn't understand". I've extended an invitation to you privately to come along to a hackathon and to help us. And I extend it again. This genuine and heartfelt invitation remains open - come along, understand what we're doing, add your experience and knowledge to the pot and help to shape the design. Get into a positive frame of mind and be a part of this. Make something happen. Gausie |
But on the other hand, to the extent that you're going beyond aggregating and curating public data, you are adding risk. And on both your web site and in other public discussions, you seem to acknowledge that there's something there to talk about (why have a security page otherwise?), but there's been a continual marked reluctance to get into specifics about even the nature of what data you're collecting, let alone how you're managing it.
What's more worrisome, this all comes after the assertion that even though the "user functionality" code is slipshod, you're still confident that "anything to do with security is not compromised." Security doesn't work like that. If you're unfortunate enough to have a buffer overflow on the machine running your stuff, it's compromised. Even if that's only in the "user functionality" code. Even if it isn't your code at all, but some other service that you weren't using, but forgot to turn off or firewall away.
You might also want to try a bit harder to see things from the point of view of your critics. One of the things they're thinking about is the Haystack anti-censorship project, which attracted enormous hype in the technical and mainstream press, but collapsed after a much-delayed security audit found the code badly wanting. I now find a collection of laments about it[1] as the top result in a Google search for "iran social media security fiasco". That's what your critics are worried about. And I'm not sure it's entirely fair on your part to ask for a more specific run-down of technical risks than that when outsiders haven't yet seen, in specific technical detail, a full run-down from your side of what the system is supposed to do in the first place.
[1] The actual page: http://webography.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/recent-resources-...
EDIT [in response to [name redacted]]: I understand that you guys are under time constraints, but you and Gausie did find time to write over 1500 words of comments between you on this HN page alone. If you'd written half that much text describing your security model in a concrete, specific, technical way we'd be having a much more productive conversation.