On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 6:44 PM, Dan Collins en.wp.st47@gmail.com wrote:
At least OTRS and mailman belong inside our security "bubble" of control, where the only people with access are ops and they can be properly secured. The security risk of those applications potentially introducing and attacker to all our data is minimal compared to the much greater risk of placing our user names, passwords, email addresses, and highly private OTRS queues in the hands of a third party including all their technicians, not to mention their security practices that we have no control over.
As for the other question. If the nsa sends a letter to WordPress then they can get the email address and IP of someone who posted a post or comment to our blog. Probably the password too. If we host it over SSL then there's no way for them to know even that a given user commented, and if we did SSL right (maybe in another ten years) no one would know whether an IP was anon browsing, a checkuser or oversight, or reading our highly sensitive OTRS queues.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html...
In which it is disclosed that, unsurprisingly, SSL poses no real challenge for the NSA. In any case, I find it hard to imagine a plausible scenario in which the NSA would be interested in a commenter on the WMF blog. (My previous post in this thread was sarcastic, in case that was unclear).