So passeth a particularly bleak week / month In The Information Wars.
We’ve got Bradley Manning given a Theatre-Sentence, partners of journalists being detained/robbed by UK border officials on behalf of the US, NZ passing laws legalising spying on citizens (which 80% of the population opposed), The Wikileaks Party in Australia self-destructing before it even got to the polls, UK Govt destroying newspaper computers etc etc etc.
Fascism is on the rise everywhere… and the only good that can be pulled from any of that is that people are (at last) maybe waking up to it. Trouble is, most of this fascism has roots in policies implemented by opposition parties when they were in power… so in two-party systems (which most still are) it doesn’t matter who you vote for. I mean there’s always one party a lot more fascist than the other… but they’re both headed in the same direction.
So vote Green I guess. Or Pirate, in countries that have viable pirate parties. New Zealand doesn’t.
It’d be nice to leave the country… or planet… or whatever, but we don’t have that choice. The only choice we have is to stay and fight… and this is all likely to get worse.
So anyway… among the numerous things I failed to mention which has an upside – the anonymous email service used by Ed Snowden – Lavabit, was threatened by the US govt and has shut down… as has the encrypted mail service run by Silent Circle. So encrypted email is serious.
Enter Mailpile – an Icelandic indiegogo candidate that has just waltzed past its $100k target
Mailpile: IndieGoGo Campaign from Brennan Novak on Vimeo.
It has some good people behind it – and is worth funding… so help fund it.
This is a stop-gap mind… what we have is an arms-race between freedom and authoritarianism, respectively using technology vs law… and encrypting everything is just one technological step, that will likely be met with changes to the law… making encryption illegal. To win, we need to get rid of the people making these laws… replace them with people who have principles, and who aren’t all about back-room deals.
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I understand that email client encryption makes no difference to privacy. That all communication is retrievable from servers regardless of what happens afterward?
Don’t think so – the weak points are the clients… ie: the point where it’s encrypted/decrypted.
If email is encrypted, then anywhere between those points is encrypted – if the encryption method is AES-256, it’s going to take until the end of time to decrypt, even with quantum computers.
This goes out the window if people are using an online services (like gmail) as clients. What the mailpile guys are doing is making an secure, distributed online service, which has a web-level user-friendliness interface onto (traditionally arcane) encryption technology.
It’s an arms-race though… what mailpile will do is stop everyone’s communications being wide-open by default… it makes wholesale hoovering that much harder. It doesn’t cure the problem though, which is that our own governments/corporations are out of control, and are rapidly devolving into self-serving tyrannies.