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

The proper solution: encrypt everything, not email

[hardaker]

You really want to encrypt everything, not just email. I'm not sure why the EU thinks encrypting just email will stop echelon from being effective. Even if echelon was was only sniffing email, they certainly would switch to sniffing other forms of communication if all email was encrypted.

The proper solution is to encrypt all your IP traffic through IPsec tunnels. Recent work within the IETF has given new ideas about how to start performing automatic IPsec connections with any host you can speak with. This is the type of solution that will help battle echelon like networks.