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How To Enable Mom w/ Encrypted E-Mail?
mad.frog asks: "Given the recent revelations of the Bush administration spying on US citizens without warrants -- and their promise to continue doing so -- it's clearly high time for me to switch to encrypted email, after years of being too lazy to bother. The real question is how I can get all (or at least some) of my email contacts to switch as well; clearly, encryption does me no good if the recipient can't decode it. What are my options, and more importantly, what are the options that will be comprehensible and usable by my parents, and in-laws? (Keep in mind that good solutions must include robust Windows and Mac support...)"
How To Enable Mom w/ Encrypted E-Mail?
Don't.
-Colin
Enigmail project website features are:
Works for me!
Personally, I just assume that whatever I write or say is being listened to. It sucks, but that's the world we live in. Don't like it? Vote for a non-fascist next time.
Don't bother using encrypted emails, because if you're not sending anything incriminating, THERE'S NO NEED.
p osts
I love this type of thinking.
Check out the 60 minutes inteview on Echelon:
KROFT: (Voiceover) Is it possible for people like you and I, innocent civilians, to be targeted by Echelon?
Mr. FROST: Not only possible, not only probable, but factual. While I was at CSE, a classic example: A lady had been to a school play the night before, and her son was in the school play and she thought he did a--a lousy job. Next morning, she was talking on the telephone to her friend, and she said to her friend something like this, 'Oh, Danny really bombed last night,' just like that. The computer spit that conversation out. The analyst that was looking at it was not too sure about what the conversation w--was referring to, so erring on the side of caution, he listed that lady and her phone number in the database as a possible terrorist.
KROFT: This is not urban legend you're talking about. This actually happened?
Mr. FROST: Factual. Absolutely fact. No legend here.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1543347/
I'll be darned if I'm going to live my life in fear that some TLA will mistake some perfectly innocent activity for terroristic proclivities. I only have control over my own mind - it's beyond my abilities to make someone else interpret my actions in the way I want.
So, I'll keep encrypting the emails I send to my friends. I'll also keep locking my door and sealing my envelopes, even though I don't have any secrets the government would be interested in.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Who cares? Do you write your letters on postcards or do you seal them inside an envelope?
Maybe he has a nosy mailadmin. Maybe he doesn't want his kid sister reading mail meant for his parents. Some of us value our privacy, even though we don't have anything to hide.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
--Cardinal Richelieu
And then, you will be itting, like John Gilmore, on a no-fly list - maintained by secret laws that no American may know about, or make reasonable enquiry.
Only, unlike Gilmore, you are probably not a multi-millionaire...
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
May I reccommend a hush.ai address, as they're offshore.
They used to be. The servers are in Canada now. You know, the Country that tried to pass the Lawful Access bill last session to "compel all telephone and Internet companies to create and maintain infrastructures that are intercept capable and to provide access to basic subscriber contact information such as a name, address or telephone number."
To send email securely over your Google's gmail account, just configure Thunderbird mail account to retrieve gmail email using your Google POP3 account information.
Thunderbird/Enigmail combo neatly address your privacy issues for both sending and receiving.
With PGP/GnuPG perfect forward-secrecy protection, you can leave all your emails in your gmail account and not bother to delete them (EVER or until your GnuPG passphrase is compromised).
Google deux-machination of trying to find AdWords in your email for their massive onslaught of advertisement campaign will come to a screeching halt when your gmail InBox contains nothing but psuedo-random data.
Good riddance to invasive AdWords into your emails...
The problem with this argument is that the reason one puts messages in envelopes very rarely has anything to do with preventing the mail carrier from reading the contents of that letter.
As a case in point, if you are sending a check, money order, or even cash to someone, most people use some sort of method of further obscuring the contents than simply putting it into an envelope. They pay extra for a box of 'Security' envelopes, printed on the inside with some pattern that makes it difficult to discern writing or printing. They wrap an additional piece of paper around the instruments. And so on. This doesn't happen in every case, but just about as often as not.
It has also been long recognized that if you are sending mail to a country or person that someone has significant concerns about, that there are several ways of opening the envelope, or even extracting the letter from within the envelope without opening it. Read or copy the contents, then return the contents of the letter and send it on it's way.
In a lot of cases the real reason for using an envelope has more to do with protecting the contents of the envelope from smudging or being separated than with preventing anyone from knowing what those contents are. If you are paying a bill, you use an envelope to keep the check and the bill stub together so that the people being paid have some idea of what the check is for.
If you get a multi-page letter from Aunt May, she is more likely to be trying to keep the pages together and in order than otherwise. If you are traveling, you very probably do send post cards, often with a picture of where you are, and a brief note wishing the recipient were along for the trip. An interested party may glean far more from a brief glance at the picture than by reading pages of text.
Note that there are a couple of elements of the above that do make sense when related to encrypting or digitally signing the e-mail that you send. For all practical purposes the e-mail that you send is a single page document. Even if you print it to 100 pages of a single spaced double sided 6 point font as far as the e-mail handling software is concerned, it doesn't matter if the message is zero bytes, or a couple million bytes. If the parts are not all put together correctly at the far end, an error is logged, and the system trys to fix the situation. Likewise the system is mostly proof against smudging or error introduction to the body of the message, as it is being handled by a TCP connection. That does not prevent changes to the headers, nor does it prevent an alteration by a malicious server in the middle. Encrypting or signing the contents does reduce the likelyhood that a change to the contents will be noticed. (Though it does nothing for the headers, including the subject.)
Of course the above is a rather simplistic explanation, and there are other elements involved.
-Rusty
You never know...
Terrorist.
Fighting the drug dealers was the excuse in the 80s. In the 90s it was saving the children. Now it's fighting terrorism. Please, keep up to date on the latest doublespeak - otherwise it's harder for the government to strip us of our rights.