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Twitter announced Friday that
it’s joining other tech companies in implementing “perfect forward
secrecy.” While many online services already encrypt user
comunications and other data, this form of encryption ensures that
snoops—we’re looking at you, National Security Agency—who break
through the encryption get access to only a snippet of data, rather
than everything belonging to a user. Even where a warrant is
involved, perfect forward secrecy has the potential to limit
intrusions, rather than acting as an open-ended skeleton key.

From Twitter’s
Jacob Hoffman-Andrews:

As part of our continuing effort to keep our users’ information
as secure as possible, we’re happy to announce that we recently
enabled forward secrecy for traffic on twitter.com,
api.twitter.com, and mobile.twitter.com. On top of the usual
confidentiality and integrity properties of HTTPS, forward secrecy
adds a new property. If an adversary is currently recording all
Twitter users’ encrypted traffic, and they later crack or steal
Twitter’s private keys, they should not be able to use those keys
to decrypt the recorded traffic.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Parker Higgins
describes how perfect forward secrecy works:

How can perfect forward secrecy help protect user privacy
against that kind of threat? In order to understand that, it’s
helpful to have a basic idea of how HTTPS works in general. Every
Web server that uses HTTPS has its own secret key that it uses to
encrypt data that it sends to users. Specifically, it uses that
secret key to generate a new “session key” that only the server and
the browser know. Without that secret key, the traffic traveling
back and forth between the user and the server is incomprehensible,
to the NSA and to any other eavesdroppers.

But imagine that some of that incomprehensible data is being
recorded anyway—as leaked NSA documents confirm the agency is
doing. An eavesdropper who gets the secret key at any time in the
future—even years later—can use it to decrypt all of the stored
data! That means that the encrypted data, once stored, is only as
secure as the secret key, which may be vulnerable to compromised
server security or disclosure by the service provider.

That’s where perfect forward secrecy comes in. When an encrypted
connection uses perfect forward secrecy, that means that the
session keys the server generates are truly ephemeral, and even
somebody with access to the secret key can’t later derive the
relevant session key that would allow her to decrypt any particular
HTTPS session. So intercepted encrypted data is protected from
prying eyes long into the future, even if the website’s secret key
is later compromised.

Facebook
also plans to implement perfect forward secrecy, and
Google has had it in place since 2011. Google points out that
“not even the server operator will be able to retroactively decrypt
HTTPS sessions,” meaning that companies that implement the security
can’t turn users’ lives into open books, no matter the
pressure they face.

As fuck-yous to the surveillance state go, this is both welcome,
and effective.

Norman Gurley, whom I noted
last week
was arrested in northern Ohio for violating the state’s new
statute prohibiting secret compartments in cars (if authorities
determine they’re being used for transporting drugs) faces a
preliminary hearing tomorrow at Oberlin Municipal Court. According
to court
documents, Ohio Highway Patrol officers weren’t kidding when
they said they’d have nothing on Gurley if they hadn’t found the
compartment. The one count of violating Ohio’s hidden compartment
law is the only charge levied against Gurley.

Even though Gurley’s preliminary hearing is scheduled for
tomorrow, Oberlin’s site does not list an attorney for the man to
try to contact. Several commenters (and e-mailers) are curious as
to how the troopers justified the search. You can probably guess,
but if not, The Morning Journal of … somewhere
nearby (dear small media outlets: Please indicate where the
hell you are on your websites and not assume that visitors already
know)
got some comments from Ohio Highway Patrol Lt. Michael
Combs:

“The troopers noticed a smell of raw marijuana, which led them
to perform a search of the car,” Combs said. “While searching, they
saw some indicators that led them to believe a secret compartment
may have been added to the car.”

So the officers were able to smell raw marijuana while standing
outside the vehicle, but they weren’t able to find any during their
search. Those are some strong noses. I bet they don’t even need
police dogs up there in Ohio. Combs added that they found evidence
that the car was being used to transport drugs, but the evidence is
not detailed.

Violating Ohio’s hidden compartment law is a fourth degree felony,
meaning a judge could sentence Gurley to up to 18 months in prison
if convicted. If the defendant had been previously convicted
(apparently not the case with Gurley) the crime becomes a
third-degree felony, leading to a sentence of up to three years. If
it turns out there are drugs in the hidden compartment, the crime
becomes a second degree felony with a potential sentence of up to
five years in prison.

Once Reason passed along the story on Thursday it spread fast
and quickly on the Internet through social media. I’ll do my best
to try to keep an eye on the case (from all the way out here in
California), and when Gurley gets an attorney, I’ll see if he or
she is willing to comment.

Interesting piece over
at Slate about the generally unsung role NBA/ABA great Rick
Barry played in creating a freer labor market in professional
basketball and sports more generally. As Dave Hollander points out,
to know Rick Barry was pretty much to hate Rick Barry. He was a
vain, egotistical, offensive jerk who rarely missed an opportunity
to offend, either intentionally or not (he once referred to the
African-American trailblazer Bill Russell as having “a watermelon
grin”).

Yet Hollander, who has a book out about the 1974-75 Golden State
Warriors, argues persuasively that Rick Barry helped put a
sledgehammer to the “reserve clause” operating in all major sports
leagues. Due to a series of awful court rulings and legislative
decisions made by idiot elected officials, the reserve clause
essentially gave all power to owners and reduced athletes to the
status of chattel (baseball’s great emancipator, Curt Flood,
explicitly likened the reserve clause to slavery).

In the late 1960s, Barry became the first NBA star to decide to
jump to the upstart ABA. In order to do so, Hollander explains, he
had to challenge basketball’s reserve clause, which among other
things forced a player to play for his current team for a year
after his contract expired unless the team let him go. Barry filed
a suit and eventually lost in court and had to sit out a year.
Still,

The ABA had its first NBA player and a legitimate jumping off
point to launch a bidding war. That bidding war gave players an
option to choose between leagues. It increased their average
salaries from $18,000 in 1967 to $110,000 in 1975. When the NBA
wanted to stop the spending madness by merging with its rival
league, do you know who blocked it? The NBA players. Why? To keep
the salary war going.

Congress was considering an exemption to antitrust rules that
would allow the rival leagues to merge and the players, led by
Oscar Robertson, wanted to make sure that the new combined league
would not simply be able to revert to old practice. He ended up
appearing before the Senate and had this positively awesome
exchange with Sen. Roman Hruska:

Robertson: I think it is terribly
wrong for anyone to limit anyone’s ability to earn money no matter
where it may be, whether it is in business or sports. I think any
time you limit a person as to where he can go, such as the case was
prior to the two leagues, I think it is terribly wrong.

Hruska: Is it wrong to limit the
amount of money a man can earn?

Robertson: I think in America it
is.

Hruska: Does the draft system do
that?

Robertson: I think if you only had
one league, that is true. As long as you have two leagues, there is
no telling what a person can earn.

Hollander sums up:

Ipso facto the ABA was the death knell for
the NBA reserve clause. Consider this syllogism: No two leagues, no
end of the reserve clause. No ABA, no two leagues. No Rick Barry,
no ABA. Therefore, no Rick Barry, no defeat of the reserve
clause.

If you care about sports, capitalism, or comb-overs
(another thing that Rick Barry pioneered),
read the whole thing.

And read Matt
Welch’s 2005 classic, “Locker-Room Liberty,” which looks at the
various ways that Joe Namath, Dick Allen, and Robertson helped to
create a sports world in which the folks actually putting asses in
the seats got a bigger cut of the amount of money they were
generating (for the time being, let’s not hold them accountable for
all the taxpayer dollars that are now propping up big-league
sports).

And watch
the great sportswriter Robert Lipsyste talk about how sports
reflects society in good, bad, and ugly ways). Specifically, check
out his comments about how tennis legend Billie Jean King was the
single-most important figure in expanding athlete’s paychecks in
post-war America (around 26.30 minutes):

Writes Nick Gillespie:

A new Quinnipiac Poll finds that only 36 percent of voters
between the ages of 18 and 29 approve of the job the president is
doing while fully 54 percent of the kids give him the thumbs down
(10 percent didn’t know or care enough to respond to the topic).
Back in March 2009, 62 percent of 18 to 29 years
approved, compared to just 20 percent disapproving.

Millennials may be young, but they’re not stupid. As bad as
Obama’s time in office has been for older
Americans, nobody has taken it on the chin quite as bad
as kids under 30, who are more likely to be unemployed, broke,
and facing decades of sub-par wages if and when they do finally get
a job.

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