Personal use of encrypted communication is yet another example of so-called ‘network effects.’ (These have been mentioned previously: 1, 2, 3.) The basic idea is that the more widespread certain technologies become, the more useful they are to everyone using them. The most commonly cited examples are telephones and fax machines; back when only a few people had them, they had limited utility. You would need alternative channels of communication and you would waste time deciding which one to use and exchanging instructions about that with other parties. Once telephones became ubiquitous, each one was a lot more powerful and convenient. The same can be said for email addresses.
Good free software exists that allows the encryption of emails at a level where it would challenge major organizations to read them. While this may not protect an individual message that falls under scrutiny, it changes the dynamic of the whole system. It is no longer possible to filter every email passing along a fibre-optic cable for certain keywords, for instance. You would need to crack every one of them first.
Making the transition to the routine use of encryption, however, requires more effort than the adoption of telephones or email. While those technologies were more convenient than their predecessors, encryption adds a layer of difficulty to communication. You need to have the required software, key pairs generated, and passphrases. It is possible to make mistakes and encrypt things such that you can never access them again.
As such, there is a double barrier to the adoption of widespread communication encryption: people must deal with the added difficulties involved in communicating in this way and with the problem that hardly anyone uses such systems now. If there is nobody out there with whom you can exchange PGP encrypted messages, you aren’t too likely to bother with acquiring and using the software. It is entirely possible that those two constraints will prevent widespread adoption for the foreseeable future.
One nice exception to this rule is Skype. Users may not know it, but calls made over Skype are transmitted in encryption form, very considerably increasing the difficulty of intercepting them. The fact that users do not know this is happening greatly increases the level of usage (you cannot avoid using it). While such systems may well not be as secure as explicit encryption efforts undertaken by senders and recipients, they may be a useful way to increase overall adoption of privacy technology. Such ‘invisible encryption’ could also be usefully incorporated into stores of personal data, such as the contents of GMail accounts.
PS. For anyone who decides to give PGP a try, my public key is available here.
Hey milan.
Hows it going? I hope you have settled in really well? Ottawa is a lovely city once you get to know it. I highly recommend the war museum. I went there every year we went to the National Improv Finals.
Anyways,
I thought I would let you know a few things. One, I made a new music video for a song I really like by the Scissor Sisters. It is called Tits on the Radio and it is on my webpage.
Secondly,
I made a MOLSON CANADIAN promotional video with my friends, and much like the original Google Idol video contest, I am in the running to win $5000 dollars (all of which I would spend on school)
It starts September 1st, and the voting is a ONE-VOTE-PER-DAY-PER-COMPUTER kind of deal. I sure hope I could win it.
If you go on my facebook page, you can find a link to the video. Also you must join the facebook group “Molson Canadian Nation” to vote starting September 1st.
I was hoping you could support once again, for the most important contest I have yet to enter. By the by, I got into the UBC film program.
I will be making a short film this year.
Hope you are doing well. Let me know if all of this makes sense.
Cheers,
Mica
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Nice photo today.
HushMail makes sending encrypted mail relatively easy, though I don’t think it is worth the bother.
One significant downside of encryption
OpenPGP Best Practices – Privacy and Authenticity
PGP (probably isn’t worth the trouble)
The only reliable way to encrypt your email is PGP—also known as Pretty Good Privacy. However, PGP is incredibly obnoxious to use. Even PGP’s creator Phil Zimmermann has stopped using it, since he can’t use it on his phone. The problem isn’t just that you have to figure out PGP, everyone you talk to also has to figure it out. Telling someone to download Signal is a lot easier than walking them through public/private key encryption. This is where your threat model comes in handy, to help figure out if PGP is actually worth it to you.
If you absolutely must use encrypted email, this guide to PGP might be helpful. It’s tricky, so you might want to go to a crypto party and have an activist or technologist help you set it up.
If you don’t have the private key, and you don’t have the revoke certificate, then there is nothing you can do about the existing key.
You should:
Generate a new pair of keys
Publish your new public key to a key server
Let anyone who uses the old key know you have a new one
Take the time to generate a revoke certificate and make and store backups.
One option to mark the lost key as revoked on the key server is detailed in this answer here
The Secret Bench of Knowledge