Re:We're Fighting the Feds Over Your Email
by e12e on Wednesday July 30, 2014 @03:51PM
(#8110523)
(I've yet to read TFA, but:)
I'm all for privacy in email, but if we're doing analogies, unencrypted email is more like postcards, than letters. And metadata is more like what's written on the letter than in it. (And SMTP over TLS would be like the mailboxes you're not allowed to look in, unless you're delivering mail, or are the recipient...)
As far as I can gather, the US has pretty shoddy laws guarding personal information from corporations -- so a change wrt email might be a win. But I don't know if this is the best way.
As long as there doesn't appear to be any viable way to get most people to use gpg/smime -- I'm not sure we're likely to get anywhere. Perhaps that is what Microsoft should do: leverage S/MIME for outlook.com (with the caveat that they would have to keep the encrypted private keys, and being a web service, could be forced to backdoor the clients in order to get the pass-phrases/passwords...).
Hm, I wonder if there's an IMAP extension for storing encrypted key-pairs?
I'm all for privacy in email, but if we're doing analogies, unencrypted email is more like postcards, than letters. And metadata is more like what's written on the letter than in it. (And SMTP over TLS would be like the mailboxes you're not allowed to look in, unless you're delivering mail, or are the recipient...)
As far as I can gather, the US has pretty shoddy laws guarding personal information from corporations -- so a change wrt email might be a win. But I don't know if this is the best way.
As long as there doesn't appear to be any viable way to get most people to use gpg/smime -- I'm not sure we're likely to get anywhere. Perhaps that is what Microsoft should do: leverage S/MIME for outlook.com (with the caveat that they would have to keep the encrypted private keys, and being a web service, could be forced to backdoor the clients in order to get the pass-phrases/passwords...).
Hm, I wonder if there's an IMAP extension for storing encrypted key-pairs?