Last night at about 11pm, Simon Phipps IMs me and writes:

Want to write a guest posting for my CWUK open source blog on Haystack and what has gone wrong?

Answer: “Hell yes” – and I was going to go to bed and do it this morning, but just then I saw Jacob Appelbaum tweeted:

Haystack is the worst piece of software I have ever had the displeasure of ripping apart. Charlatans exposed. Media inquiries welcome.

…and bang ended any thoughts of sleep; while Simon wangled an interview with Jacob, I fired up Skype, GoogleDocs and the Nespresso machine, and we started gathering the notes. We got 15 minutes with Jacob via phone at around 0300, Simon turned in around 0430 and me about an hour later, and I got up again at 0830 to finish it by which time news broke of Daniel Colascione’s resignation… so rework, re-edit and post.

The result originally had the title Burning Haystacks – with a rather sharper byline – and is now at up ComputerWorld:

Award-Winning Haystack Security System Could Risk Iranian Lives
The naive enthusiasm of an American marketing graduate, hyped by the world media, may have risked the lives of Iranian activists through over-reaching claims for an inadequately understood software system

Haystack – brainchild of Guardian Innovator of the Year Austin Heap – has in less than 24 hours crashed from cause célèbre to epic, life-threatening tragedy. A marketing graduate from a business college, Heap’s positive, naive “Can-Do” attitude and bright-eyed philanthropic spirit would be enough to power a rescue mission. But it takes more than energetic goodwill to solve difficult security problems. A Chaos Computer Club investigator has discovered sadly that Heap and his team’s lack of experience has carried through to the design of Haystack and that this has potentially endangered the lives of Iranian activists.

[…]

[This article was written by Alec Muffett of greenlanesecurity.com, with assistance from Simon Phipps]

It’s nice to be back in print again; thanks, Simon.