European Commission Recommends OSS to Fight Echelon

CrossRhythm writes: "The European Commission Resolution on Echelon encourages the Commission and Member States "to promote software projects whose source text is made public", to lay down a standard for the level of security of e-mail software packages, placing those packages whose source code has not been made public in the "least reliable" category," and "systematically to encrypt e-mails, so that ultimately encryption becomes the norm"."

Comments

This is stupid

[Reality Master 101]

If your goal is encrypted e-mail, what does the source code have to do with anything? As long as it follows published encryption algorithms, that's all that matters. After all, if it doesn't follow the standard, then it's kind of hard to decrypt it.

I think it's a tad more important for the underlying mathematics to be tight, than to be able to view the source code implementation of an inferior algorithm.