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A Year After Snowden's Disclosures, EFF, FSF Want You To Fight Surveillance

Posted by timothy on from the why-make-it-easy-for-'em? dept.

Today, as the EFF notes, marks one year from Edward Snowden's first document leaks, and the group is using that as a good spur to install free software intended to make it harder for anyone (the NSA is certainly not the first, and arguably far from the worst) to spy on your electronic communications. Nowadays, that means nearly everything besides face-to-face communication, or paper shipped through the world's postal systems. Reader gnujoshua (540710) highlights one of the options: 'The FSF has published a (rather beautiful) infographic and guide to encrypting your email using GnuPG. In their blog post announcing the guide they write: "One year ago today, an NSA contractor named Edward Snowden went public with his history-changing revelations about the NSA's massive system of indiscriminate surveillance. Today the FSF is releasing Email Self-Defense, a guide to personal email encryption to help everyone, including beginners, make the NSA's job a little harder.'" Serendipitous timing: a year and a day ago, we mentioned a UN report that made explicit the seemingly obvious truth that undue government surveillance, besides being an affront in itself, chills free speech. (Edward Snowden agrees.)

5 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. No point encrypting if you're the only one... by nine-times · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There's no point in encrypting your email with something like GPG if you're the only one using it, and most people aren't going to use it until it's easy.

    I know, you'll tell me it's easy. Just download this software, install it, and it'll work for your email client assume you're still using an email client and there's a plugin available for it, which there might not be. Otherwise you need to copy and paste and stuff, and... oh right, then there's also the whole issue of managing keys and keeping a backup copy safe. Most people don't back anything up.

    You have to make it easy. Someone will get angry because I appear to be praising Apple, but take iMessage's encryption for example. Do people using it know that their messages are encrypted? Probably not. Are they given a choice? No. Do they know that they're generating encryption keys? Probably not. Are they asked to manage their own encryption keys? No.

    That's easy. GPG isn't. Email encryption needs to be that easy, or people won't use it.

    1. Re:No point encrypting if you're the only one... by Capslock118 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I agree 100%. I'd say 50% of my communication is with my family, and there is not a single person in that group that would be able to handle GPG. And anyway, we are at the point of "every message on every device", and again most of my family communicates on their smartphones, not on a desktop or laptop. Even if they did use a desktop/laptop the message would still have to be easily read on all of their devices (including default apps). There is just no point in wasting my time with email encryption since I am not any kind of political advocate and no one I communicate with would be able to use encryption. Heck, I have S/MIME on all of my devices for email and that works great and it's automatic......but I am the only person in my circle who uses that even though it's arguable easier to use than GPG (because it's supported by most of the default email applications out there). Why even bother with trying to ram encryption into email when there are other secure communication protocols out there?

  2. Fixing a social problem with technical means? by cpghost · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Basically, we're making it WAY too easy for the NSA to spy on us. But, even if we all switched to encrypted mail, that's not enough: with their metadata collection, they can still infer a lot of things from our communications patterns. So technically, we need I2P, Freenet or similar anonymizing technology to hide in the crowd. However, to REALLY fix the problem once and for all, we need to take it to the political arena, and fight for majorities to get Congress to reign in NSA in earnest, no matter what "Yes We Scan" Obama wants. If we don't, Orwell's 1984 will remain in effect, no matter how much we use OSS, encryption and so on.

    --
    cpghost at Cordula's Web.
  3. pointless by Charliemopps · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is pointless. The 5 people that do this will be protected when they communicate with one another. That's it.

    Lets be clear. I don't care if Google or Facebook are spying on me (well, I do, but that's an entirely different topic.) The NSA is definitely the "worst" despite what this says. I'm even less concerned about foreign governments or criminals spying on me. The real danger is to our entire way of life. What the NSA is doing could be used to turn us into a true totalitarian state... very easily. What China, or some script kiddy, or even what Google can do with this information pales in comparison to the atrocities the federal government could commit with this power. The only thing restraining them at this time is their own will not to do so. That is NOT acceptable in my opinion. How long before we elect the next Nixon? or Stalin? It will happen, it always does. What will they do with this power?

  4. Agreed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The essence of this demand is "You have a responsibility to smarten-up."

    That has never, and will never, work. Humans simply do not work that way.

    My optimistic side says the major players will make it easy, like your example from Apple, and then all will be good.

    My cynical side says the government will simply slap some gag orders on the industry players, and impose backdoors, and roll merrily along with the surveillance.

    The *only* people who can be protected from this are those smart enough, and motivated enough, to do something that is not easy.