Oh my, the miniature safe analogy was one of the methods I used to try to explain to my wife why messaging privacy was an issue. :-) "OK, I don't know the comb

Oh my, the miniature safe analogy was one of the methods I used to try to explain to my wife why messaging privacy was an issue. :-) "OK, I don't know the combination, I just have a bunch of safes with your name on them, and only you know the combination..." I'm not so concerned about the "timeliness" issue on a sub-yearly scale. It was a throwaway possible benefit of using multiple keys, cryptosystems, and decentralized transmission. As one of the elements is compromised by advancements in the art, they can be deprecated in favor of a stronger one. By timely, I meant that it would be less economical to slurp up everything with the goal of SNA on a cohort of college friends or whatever. I'd like an increase in the reasonable expectation of privacy with email. I would of course comply with a legal demand, authorized by a judge in my country, to surrender cleartext emails that are on my systems or in my accounts. I would expect my partners in conversation to do the same. What I do not like, and I think we agree, is the convenient slurping of all the traffic, storing that, and then mining it for correlations with "un-American" conduct. What I've found to be a more useful explanation trying to explain "security" as we usually mean it is to get to the reason why I think people should have privacy from their government or the agencies to whom they willingly transmit information about individuals. We've come a long way in securing rights for people who are not white, christian (of accepted denominations), straight, men. We have a lot longer to go. I am really quite uncomfortable with a HUAC-style group having access to all electronic communications. It was communism fifty years ago, it's obviously terrorism now, but it will always be some threat to "national security" that is used as an excuse to be proactive about looking for suspicious characters because of what crimes they may be inclined to commit. (And I kept using my own boot-root installation on my first Linux box (which could now legally buy alcohol in the USA) until 2000 or 2001, when I tried this "Redhat" thing. :-))