Peter Roozemaal
Topic:
SmallMail, keep your email private in a world of data collection
Company:
smallsister.org Since high-school age Peter has been interested in computers, programming, legal and political issues. After his Mathematics graduation in Delft, he started working as a software developer.
Peter has volunteered for programming and system administration tasks on bulletin boards and weblogs, most notably working as a webmaster for groklaw.net. Peter very early became active in SmallSister, a group that is looking to reclaim (some) Internet privacy from the hands of multinationals and governments (EU Data Retention).
Abstract:
When the European data retention directive becomes law in all member nations governments will store who's e-mailing whom and who's phoning whom. This is bad news for citizens and has a devastating effect journalists and bloggers who need to protect their sources (especially whistleblowers).
Another worrying trend is warrantless wiretapping in the USA, combined with government datamining and the unbridled data collection on the Internet, especially by online ad agencies. (think Google and worse) The Small Sister Project created a tool, SmallMail. It adds anonimity to e-mail even when data retention is in effect. So SmallMail delivers e-mail privacy as it was meant to be: you decide what happens with your data. When needed and allowed people can deliver a message totally anonymously. The talk highlights the tools and then deals with the technical details of getting from A to B and the trade-offs that need to be made to avoid leaking too much information. We build on the strong foundation laid by the Tor Project. The SmallMail engine is technically interesting in its use of cryptography, but the concepts behind it should be easy to understand.
Topics covered in the talk:
* Privacy and Anonymity basics and current threats
* SmallMail conceptual design
* Creation and authentication of anonymous accounts in SmallMail
* a demo of the tool
Presentation:
