Slashdot Mirror
Security After the Death of Trust
An anonymous reader writes "Simon St. Laurent reviews the options in the wake of recent NSA revelations. 'Security has to reboot. What has passed for strong security until now is going to be considered only casual security going forward. As I put it last week, the damage that has become visible over the past few months means that we need to start planning for a computing world with minimal trust.'"
I try to get my family to stop using gmail, and instead use a local mail program which they can then use for end to end encryption, private non-cloud storage of their old emails, etc, but they don't want to bother. They'd rather have google storing all their emails and are fine with the advertising they get shown as a result of the data-mining of the email contents. They don't care about the NSA because they "aren't doing anything wrong".
That's what security is up against: people who want to put all their information in "the cloud" and don't really care what that means for privacy and security or even services that can disappear at any time or change their terms of service at any moment. It's all about the simplicity, and nothing else matters except allowing it to be a brainless usage model.
For the rest, nobody cares
I do. I fucking care that I can't communicate without big brother leaning over my shoulder to make sure I'm a good citizen. It's fucked up. Even if they never used a single byte of the data, the act itself is fucked up. Besides that, laws change. Much more of your day to day life than you imagine is already illegal to some extent or another. With pervasive eavesdropping you're just one ticked off bureaucrat away from a prison sentence. And even if you yourself by some miracle live (an almost impossible) squeaky clean lifestyle, it's even less likely that your family and friends to as well.