What is the point of keeping e-mail
private by e.g. encrypting their content?
�If you want to go onto the list of persons to be watched, write a
few mails that contain words like "bomb", "Beehive", etc. Be sure
that existing surveillance programs will catch it and bring you to
the attention of one of the observers employed by the organization
running the surveillance. So you go on the list and are marked
"Subversive, to be watched". And if I then send a picture of a
Queen Bee, what other reaction can you expect than "Assassination
Plans" and a general alert?
Catch it?
Unfortunately for these security types, I did learn the one or
other bit about thermodynamics and concepts like "Closed System"
and "Second Law". Closed System is like a room with doors. If one
is locked, try the next one, and if that is locked too, try the
next next one. Replace "door" with "encryption" and you get the
link. But don't forget that rooms also have windows, air
conditioning ducts, etc., all of which can be used to get into the
room, by person or by proxy (listening device).
Meta-data come to mind here, data about you and me that are needed
to get that mail from one place to the other and thus need to be
clear text. Peter has sent us enough mails on that topic to make
clear even to me how transparent we all are there, e.g. "[wlug]
81% of Tor Users Can Be De-anonymized By Analysing Router
Information", sent 15 Nov 2014.
"Second Law" encompasses all the methods available to me to
downgrade my presence on the watch list and thus make the list
inconsequential. General Alerts are great to have, but 100 false
alerts? Entropy is not just about heat, it is also about
information.
Peter has done enough work on data mining (i.e. catching the few
fish (=useful information) in a huge lake of muddy and unpalatable
water), so what about doing something that allows those fish to
escape his nets?
Steganography is one way this may be done. Planting doubt in the
mind of the observer is another. Read this mail a second time, and
see how I set out to make myself a terrorist suspect at the start,
and then ask yourself, after you have read all of it: "Is he ISIL
material? Or is he just a modern version of Diogenes?" (a Greek
cynic, cynic meaning "dogs that bark don't bite?"
Wolfgang
On 22/08/15 16:38, Chris O'Halloran wrote:
On 2015-08-22 14:45, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
True. Perhaps the right approach is to build the ability into the
e-mail app to mark an entire thread as confidential, so replies to it
are automatically encrypted.
What you've described would be excellent.
It just surprises me that tool like Outlook do not already do
this.� And the third party tools that try (I've tried using
them) are still a bit clunky and not up with the latest
versions.
It almost seems like the agenda is 'don't implement PGP in
Outlook, we don't want to upset our friends who gather a lot of
business intelligence by keeping email unencrypted'
�
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