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Re: Carnivore Update - Washington Post 11/21/00

  • From: Shawn McMahon
  • Date: Thu Nov 23 22:53:41 2000

On Thu, Nov 23, 2000 at 07:16:49PM -0800, Vadim Antonov wrote:
> 
> useful certificate validation support.  How many users actually check that
> site certificate indeed belongs to whoever is identified as the site owner
> on the Web pages?

Not relevant; presumably one would have accessed one's web mail at some
point in the past, before Carnivore was installed at one's ISP.

If so, the certificate will have been obtained long ago.

> commercial entity. Of course, i have no proof that this happened, but I
> have no reason to trust that it didn't happen, too.)

It is a tremendous stretch to go from "we don't know" to "has no problem
decrypting".  That's what I'm objecting to; the original statement was
not provable, and all I did was ask for the source.

So far I haven't gotten a source, I've gotten assertions that SSL is
weak (of course it is) with this somehow implying that Carnivore can
magically decrypt things immediately.

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