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Maybe I'm just not "getting it", but this seems like an incredibly odd decision. It is not a revelation that plaintext email can technically be looked at by pe
by rainsford 13y ago
Maybe I'm just not "getting it", but this seems like an incredibly odd decision. It is not a revelation that plaintext email can technically be looked at by people beyond the sender and recipient. And it's not clear what in any reported stories would specifically relate to Groklaw's use of email.
What it seems to come down to is the general fear that the NSA COULD, from a technical perspective, be reading specific unencrypted emails. But before the recent news stories, did PJ (or anyone else) really send and receive emails thinking "there is no way the NSA, or anyone else, can see this email"?
As far as chilling effects go, the knowledge that a multi-billion dollar signals intelligence agency is technically capable of reading an unencrypted email seems pretty mild. Is free speech and free communication really so fragile that it rests on the idea that casual communication you make no special effort to protect is totally out of the reach of large police or intelligence organizations?
- jebblue 13y agoMy thoughts too, to me, ordinary email is like a conversation in the park. People can listen to that if they want, it's the public. Ordinary email goes over the public Internet. It seems to me to be a bit of elegant arm waving. To me the restrictions on encryption are of more concern. It's like saying we can't have a private conversation except within the bounds of what the government says is OK.
- nbouscal 13y ago> ordinary email is like a conversation in the park. That's really, really distant from how the average non-technical user thinks of email. They just drop the e and think of it as mail.