Re: Encrypted e-mails?
On Friday 07 September 2018 09:18:59 Dave Sherohman wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 06, 2018 at 03:44:22PM +0200, Torben Schou Jensen wrote:
> > We have smartphones with software from Apple and Google, but we are
> > unsure if they look in our data.
>
> Don't be silly. Of course they do.
>
> > But it is still very common to send unencrypted e-mails, open post
> > cards. So why not use OpenPGP to encrypt e-mails, it is free, I am
> > trying to find out how to?
>
> Can't speak for anyone else, but...
>
> I don't give a damn.
>
> I'm sending this message to a public email list that anyone can
> subscribe to, and I know that it's archived in many, many places,
> several of which can be browsed by the general public. It is not
> private, by design, so why would I bother with encrypting it in
> transit?
>
> If I were transmitting information that I actually wanted to keep
> secret, I wouldn't put it in the body of an email at all.
>
> The current push for enhanced privacy is all well and good, but the
> crusaders often forget that there's a lot of information out there
> which is intended to be public or which people simply don't care if it
> becomes public. There is absolutely no need to encrypt such
> information, therefore "encrypt everything" is not the moral
> imperative they make it out to be.
Part of that is that if it all becomes encrypted, then the TLA's will
spend so much time decrypting our emails containing this drivel at worst
that the may give up. IOW, it makes a statement they can see in the
power bill and hours effort to read all of it in hopes they'll find a
clue. The TLA's occasionally surprise me, but generally you could tape
the clue to their butt and they couldn't find it with both hands.
As the situation now stands, an encrypted email is a bright red flag in
front of the bull in a china shop, so they will expend a lot of cpu
cycles to read it because if it didn't contain sensitive data, it
wouldn't be encrypted in the first place. The encryption insures that it
will be read, then a small maybe that it will be delivered to the
addressee. If its a trigger msg, you can bet it will be printed for
later perusal by a grand jury and the digital copy will be delivered
to /dev/null.
> (There's an argument to be made for using cryptographic signatures to
> validate the authenticity and integrity of messages, but that doesn't
> require encrypting the actual content itself.)
--
Cheers, Gene Heskett
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
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