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Two Years After Snowden Leaks, Encryption Tools Are Gaining Users
Patrick O'Neill writes: It's not just DuckDuckGo — since the first Snowden articles were published in June 2013, the global public has increasingly adopted privacy tools that use technology like strong encryption to protect themselves from eavesdroppers as they surf the Web and use their phones. The Tor network has doubled in size, Tails has tripled in users, PGP has double the daily adoption rate, Off The Record messaging is more popular than ever before, and SecureDrop is used in some of the world's top newsrooms.
....and not a word about TrueCrypt? is there any commonly used alternative or people just don't care?
Because that would create an obvious way to poison the DNS records so that a site would become unreachable. something very easy for a government to do. It would make everything in China and Russia immediately lower to their knees. It would eventually happen in other places but would just take longer.
I believe that something serious is being done as soon as I start seeing gpg signatures in emails. To me that is the first step. Not so much the encoding and that nobody can read it, but that I am sure that the mail from my bank is from my bank.
Because not only will that show me that they are doing something about it. It will show me that they are serious. It will also show others and will make other people start using it.
That way I can send an email from my address, sign it and it will be offcial. There are obviously several ways of doing this.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
That argument only works if you are a "person of interest". For 99.9999% of people, the point is to avoid mass surveillance, not targeted surveillance. Yes, if the government targets YOU, you are fucked. But that is not the threat model that applies to almost everyone, and it remains highly useful to frustrated the mass surveillance state.
Because no one else would need to use weapons-grade encryption.
True, I don't need to use encryption everywhere, but I do just because I can. It amuses me that if anyone wants to snoop on my communications that they see the digital equivalent of an upraised middle finger, and not my plaintext.
I also enjoy the fantasy of someone spending an inordinate amount of resources to decrypt my emails only to discover that all I'm doing is sending LOLcat photos to my friends.
Schneier has some interesting points in this blog post.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.