On Tuesday, July 23, 2019 at 7:34:11 AM UTC+4, Matthew Hardeman wrote: > It is an interesting question. It essentially becomes a gamble on whether > they'll back down or just fork their own KazakhFox. But if they do push > this all the way with a national browser, then their people are even > further worse off.
Pardon my broken English. I will be referring to "totalitarian governments" in general, not naming a specific country (countries) to be one. I plea that doing nothing or implementing an easily dismissable warning will be an equivalent of a green light for mass-scale government-sanctioned MiTMs and further political persecutions based on the collected data. While a ban of the CA will be a warning for any totalitarian state that such measures have a hidden cost and complications that they are not ready to take - even if they will make a "TruthFox" and it will turn out to be less secure, the only added risk on top of it will be a slight increase of a chance of a trojan infection. We know that MiTM is not just blocking access - MiTM also means collection of information. Between staying free/alive and a not working hard drive (or loss of personal data/money that is not comparable to a lengthy prison sentence with a criminal record or a *loss of life*) everyone will chose the first, not the second - ergo, the end user will be harmed more if no action/insufficient action is taken. With all due respect, all theoretical measures that a totalitarian government might take to negate CA ban in all major browsers will require them to spent *even more resources* and complicate the spying process even further. Speaking generally, corrupt governments like to spent resources "on security", but will become rather stingy when it will turn out that a significant sum of money will be spent out of their pockets. In turn, it will lead to pushing all of the support on third parties while increasing the levels of corruption, miscommunication, non-compliance and etc., breaking the process down and postponing it/cancelling it entirely. Since all of that can not be done instantly, all of this will happen on the background of increasing civil unrest, where the totalitarian government's actions will be to blame to "messing with the internet" and the suffering from it commercial sector will be very active in lobbying for the repeal of the law. I believe that the Russian anti-blogger law of 2014 has practically fallen apart in 2017 exactly due to a non-compliance of foreign parties and a feeble implementation in general - such a thing wouldn't happen if major social platforms didn't treat it as a slight and easily ignorable nuisance. I ask everyone opposing taking drastic measures to reconsider - it's not the time to worry about the market share of the browser, comparing it to legitimate activities of a commercial sector or thinking of all theoretical ways the government might defeat the taken measures. Today is Kazakhstan, tomorrow - Russia (I believe we almost did the similar thing too, but it was thrown away due to encryption licensing complications - don't quote me on that, I haven't checked updates on this topic), the day after it might be your country (remember all proposals (or even the accepted laws) against encryption in major Western countries). Even little "sticks in the wheel" help and warn everybody else against doing the same. _______________________________________________ dev-security-policy mailing list dev-security-policy@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-security-policy
