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First of all, most messaging platforms today are encrypted, so that rfc wouldn't really apply except to monitoring by the company providing the service, and tha

First of all, most messaging platforms today are encrypted, so that rfc wouldn't really apply except to monitoring by the company providing the service, and that's the price you pay for "free stuff on the internet". Second, almost all the "attackers" are nation-states and your ISP. If it's illegal to read your mail, it should be illegal to read your email (simple regulatory fix). That just leaves spy organizations, and nobody but computer geeks and privacy nutjobs cares about that.

dane-pgp 9y ago
First of all, some messaging platforms today are End-to-End encrypted, which is in keeping with the thinking behind that RFC. Given that such models of communication are available as "free stuff on the internet", we shouldn't expect anything less than that from now on (and we should be improving email protocols and implementations to offer at least an equivalent level of privacy). Second, your "simple regulatory fix" is proving to be not so simple in many nation-states, even ones which claim to be democracies, and I don't think we should ignore people's need for privacy and security while we wait for government policy to fix itself. Indeed, if we do not strengthen the level of privacy and security that people enjoy, the job of fixing government policy becomes that much harder. To give some examples of recent attacks that even non-technical users need to think about (or at least be protected from), consider these: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/verizon-x-uidh https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/verizon-x-uidh https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/03/30/china-has-weaponized-the-great-firewall-says-a-free-speech-group/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/03/30...