[liberationtech] issilentcircleopensourceyet.com

[Roger Dingledine]

On Tue, Nov 06, 2012 at 02:28:36PM -0500, Nadim Kobeissi wrote:
> I believe that releasing closed-source, unreviewed and centralized crypto
> software and then marketing it as secure to be malpractice. That is simply
> my point.

I stopped looking at SilentCircle when I was looking through their
FAQ: https://silentcircle.com/web/faq/
and clicked on the question "Is Silent Phone secure?" expecting an answer
like "well, it depends what you mean by secure, but here's what it does
and doesn't do for you" and instead got the answer "Yes it is."

I'm sure we can have a debate about the relative merits of misleading
your users for their own good ("if we didn't say that, they'd go use
an even worse system that does say it"), but it's times like this that
I'm glad I work for a non-profit that doesn't have to make a business
tradeoff to decide how much to lie to its users.

--Roger