Get a personal cert and you can use it natively in Apple Mail, not just for signing but also for encryption. We should be helping friends, family, and colleagues do this.

I would say this is close enough to warrant the hyperbolie.

https://www.eff.org/cases/jewel

Encryption is great, as long as the people you don't want to hear it can't decrypt it. Given the NSA's recent moves to build up computing power, and the way Moore's law works, your encrypted communications today are fodder for review tomorrow.

Oh, certainly the NSA is monitoring a lot and trying to monitor more, but my pedantic side had to call out the "EVERY single thing". :) Thanks for the link though, I had forgotten the details of that case and only vaguely remember hearing about the Obama administration's move to dismiss it. (Which is funny, because presently a common criticism is that Obama keeps blaming his predecessor for everything wrong. He doesn't seem very keen on prosecution...)

It's easy to future-proof your encryption, even in the face of exponential increases in computing power. The biggest danger to encryption systems that rely on integer factoring (i.e. RSA) right now is feasible quantum computing, but there are schemes that don't rely on factoring so there's hope on that front. For the trivial stuff I bother encrypting, I'm more worried about, in increasing order, being given the choice of decrypting something or getting shot or sent to prison for life (fortunately we have some precedent in the US and elsewhere against this), being tortured for a while without knowing why before being asked to decrypt something, and being tortured without having any information but being unable to convince the torturer of that.

I know the bidders who were seeking designing their new Utah Datacenter. I think I am perfectly well acquainted with what the NSA does.

Thanks to HN Notify (http://hnnotify.com/) I know what your post said before you edited. :P Knowing that, I'm sure you're aware of all kinds of crazy NSA crap others aren't, so thanks for flashing your credentials; as I said in another comment, I was pretty much just being pedantic about the "EVERYTHING".