4 ms·
Total overreaction. E-mail is not insecure now because the NSA is scooping up all the traffic or making backroom deals with e-mail providers. It is, and alway
by blcknight 13y ago
Total overreaction. E-mail is not insecure now because the NSA is scooping up all the traffic or making backroom deals with e-mail providers. It is, and always was, sent over the wire in plaintext. You're writing postcards.
Read Phil Zimmermann's comments 22 years ago that seem especially relevant:
http://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html http://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html
Don't let the government intimidate you.
- rfrey 13y agoHer reaction is not because of a sudden realization that email is plaintext. It is to her sudden realization that her faith in the rule of law is no longer warranted.
- ape4 13y agoAn excuse to retire?
- jlgreco 13y agoShe already did that for the most part; if she wanted to stop entirely she wouldn't need an excuse.
- blcknight 13y agoSeems like you're kind of putting words into PJ's mouth. Her reason at the beginning is exactly because e-mail is not secure: "The owner of Lavabit tells us that he's stopped using email and if we knew what he knew, we'd stop too. There is no way to do Groklaw without email. Therein lies the conundrum."
- wonderzombie 13y agoNot really. She talks about the rule of law explicitly: "You'll find all the laws in the US related to privacy and surveillance there. Not that anyone seems to follow any laws that get in their way these days. Or if they find they need a law to make conduct lawful, they just write a new law or reinterpret an old one and keep on going. That's not the rule of law as I understood the term." "I loved doing Groklaw, and I believe we really made a significant contribution. But even that turns out to be less than we thought, or less than I hoped for, anyway. My hope was always to show you that there is beauty and safety in the rule of law, that civilization actually depends on it. How quaint." Obviously it's a combination of factors. But if one of the factors motivating groklaw was a belief in this, it seems that it vanished overnight. Maybe it would've been worth going on if it seemed like anything was going to change.
- ja27 13y agoWhat's changed is that now more and more people realize the futility of crypto when the government can force you to decrypt or treat you as a criminal just for using crypto.