Slashdot Mirror
Do Slashdotters Encrypt Their Email?
An anonymous reader writes "Many years ago when I first heard of PGP, I found an add-on that made it fairly simple to use PGP to encrypt my email. Despite the fact that these days most people know that email is a highly insecure means of communication, very few people that I know ever use any form of email encryption despite the fact that it is pretty easy to use. This isn't quite what I would have expected when I first set it up. So, my question to fellow Slashdotters is 'Do you encrypt your email? If not, 'Why not?' and 'Why has email encryption using PGP or something similar not become more commonplace?' The use of cryptography used to be a hot topic once upon a time."
You simply trust the postman not to open your letters. You trust the ISP not to read your email.
In your country, maybe, but that's certainly not the common case.
When I was growing up in a communist European country, the postal service would open letters and packages often. First of all, packages were routinely screened for 'contraband', and on top of that, all government agencies were rife with corruption, so theft of mailed goods was also commonplace. Sending anything valuable via post was a risk.
This is still the situation today in many (most?) third-world countries.
Ditto with the internet. You can be certain that the government controls and monitors traffic flowing through ISPs in a long list of countries such as China or Vietnam, and even the good old United States is well known for tapping into international links and using the information to benefit their domestic interests. That may not be a problem if you're a US citizen working for a US company -- it might even be a benefit -- but most of the world doesn't fall into that category.
One major concern is that currently most major 'cloud' services providers are US owned and have data centres in the US. Any major foreign business that engages in international dealings that intersect with US interests (e.g.: resource exports, oil exploration, etc...) ought to think twice before using US IT infrastructure to send or store anything related to the deal.