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Thanks for the info. But I'm a bit confused. If government officials have the ability to easily encrypt their messages asymmetrically, AND they're supposed to

Thanks for the info. But I'm a bit confused. If government officials have the ability to easily encrypt their messages asymmetrically, AND they're supposed to store all of their messages in some kind of database, that sort of defeats the purpose of the encryption in the first place. Also, having a central store of all that information seems really risky and inherently less secure than a message encrypted asymmetrically. And, for that matter, if they are supposed to encrypt messages with a private key, that means they're not using asymmetric encryption for private communication. I'm not a security expert, but that seems like a bad move.

Retric 12y ago
It's not just about encription it's also a question of varification that the email came from the person that it seems to. That's where the senders smart card comes into play they sign the email and need it to get the recepents public key. Also, the government wants a back door. So, they keep a copy of the private key's and assign them to an employee. The goal is to prevent interception and or data breeches on a lost laptop, not to hide the information from everyone. The same backdoor exits with full disk encryption so internal IT can help users who forgot their password etc.