Comments on: The scandal isn’t Swedish

By: TheGoldenAura » Blog Archive » Suecos sem privacidade na internet e telefone

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:49:56 +0000

[...] Philipp von Weihausen comenta algo interessante. “Anyway, all of this really isn’t a scandal. It’s sad, wrong, and many other things. The real scandal, however, is that nobody is using email encryption. If we all wrote encrypted emails, good luck to any government agent trying to make out what we’re writing each other. We use encryption when buying junk off the internet, when doing online banking, even when checking in code into a version control repository. Why aren’t we doing email encryption?” [...]

By: Pirate Bay antwortet auf Schwedens Überwachungsgesetz mit Kryptografie-Tools — mrtopf.de

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:20:49 +0000

[...] folgen, Anleitung zum Verschlüsseln der eigenen Festplatte und von Netzwerk-Sessions. Auch Philipp hat sich schon gefragt, warum denn eigentlich nicht mehr Leute E-Mail-Verschlüsselung benutzen. Für mich ist die Antwort [...]

By: Doug Napoleone

Doug Napoleone — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 21:58:23 +0000

Here is a good screencast on using Firefox+FireGPG+Gmail to encrypt your gmail. Of course this assumes that the person you are sending too also is using a client which supports PGP (or is doing a similar hack on top of GMail).

http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=videos/using-GPG-PGP-FireGPG-to-encrypt-and-sign-email-from-gmail

By: Christian Scholz

Christian Scholz — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:00:30 +0000

Sorry, I think it is still a scandal

Nevertheless email encryption could be used more. But then it also needs to be simpler to use and in fact it isn’t. Maybe this move gives this a push though.

And email btw. is only one thing, a whole traffic analysis is a different thing.

And what is a central, trusted site? That’s the next thing which will be legislated away.

By: Erik

Erik — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 15:44:07 +0000

Even if the data is encrypted the mere fact that communication has occurred is sometimes enough. What you would need is that the entire message, including header, is encrypted and tunneled in and out of Sweden. GPG + Tor might cut it, as long as the Swedish gestapo don’t set up their own Tor node and you happen to get that node as entry/exit point.

By: philikon

philikon — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 13:05:57 +0000

Tres: All you really need is a central, trusted site to manage other people’s public keys. We already have such trusted sites when it comes to SSL certificates, why can’t the same work for public keys that are used in emails? Knowing that such services already do exist, I can’t help but wonder why they aren’t hooked up to the email programs.

By: Tres Seaver

Tres Seaver — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 12:29:38 +0000

The whole issue is the trust mechanism for *other* people’s keys. Making that Just
Work for folks who can’t be bothered means giving Big Brother another way to snoop.
Qui custodiet custodiens?

By: Fernando Correa

Fernando Correa — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 12:25:31 +0000

I agree it should be built-in. It should be built-in for every networked app (!).
Thunderbird would be an excenlent candidate to have this defaulting to all email accounts and if you wanted, and *only* if you wanted, you would be able to disable encryption.
In fact, it should be pretty hard to disable this feature to enforce security.

I hope Brazil’s government never start doing such things. I’d move to pirate bay’s island if they start it.
Mmmm…..they might have started already.

By: encolpe

encolpe — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 12:17:09 +0000

> nyy ryrpgebavp genssvp pbzvat va be tbvat bhg bs gur pbhagel haqre fheirvyynapr

Pna jr frevbhfyl vagrtengr bar clguba tct zbqhyr vagb bhe nccyvpngvbaf gb pelcg nyy qngn fgberq naq hfr bayvar qrpelcgvba sbe hfref ?

By: Lennart Regebro

Lennart Regebro — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:41:22 +0000

Yeah, beats me. It’s not that it’s complicated to do. At least not in the open source world, where exporting these technologies is less of an issue.