The more people join in and become dependent on CF, the more incentive there is to subvert CF. Or am I being dumb?
Another thing is the motivation to send people to work for CF. And another thing is the question of preparation vs hope.
Are you, by chance, an operative, sir? :)
I dare say that Cloudflare would represent excellent value for money to the intelligence agencies.
And Google. And Apple. And Microsoft.
Less good value though. Cloudflare is currently 1/20th the valuation and is actively operating as a MITM attack on half of the internet.
Ok, so grant for the moment that it’s both the largest conspiracy ever and the best kept secret ever.
How is anyone worse off using their OHTTP gateway than not using it? Is the idea that CF is this spectacular conspiracy, but nobody thought of capturing traffic from backbones?
Cloudflare Proxy, which is required for their ddos protection - and which as I recall accounts for like half of internet traffic - handles TLS termination at CF servers.
When you capture traffic at internet backbones, which the NSA does (Room 641A), you don't get to middle-man the encrypted traffic. Cloudflare gets access to unencrypted traffic, because they act as the TLS termination.
Most companies take this trade-off because "we can trust cloudflare", or "the data isn't that important, and besides it's encrypted the rest of the way anyway."