Privacy from whom?

[John Drabik]

On Sun, 06 Aug 2000 17:56:07 -0400 (EDT), Ralph Cohen wrote:

>If I want to send someone something in
>absolute confidence that I am afraid might be compromised by having my
>email intercepted, I simply choose another method.

Internet e-mail, by default, passes through a large number of
intermediate sites that are uncontrolled.  Faxes and letters, while
still attackable by the government or monopolies (such as the phone
company) do not suffer from quite the same problem.  ANYBODY can
target your e-mail, or that of 10,000 other people, as desired.  To
go after you FAX or private mail, they have to spend a lot more time
and effort, infiltrate the phone company or post office, etc. 
Nowhere near the same.

> Same thing goes for
>faxes or phone calls - I don't have a scrambler on either of them,
>either.

But again, it is highly unlikely that anybody other than the direct
recipients would hear your phone call (ok, so a bug is possible, but
they still have to target *you* directly, and there's a limit as to
how much one person, or one small group, can infiltrate your private
communications channels.  E-mail is not a private channel by any
stretch.  Phone calls result in "he said/she said" (unless someone
wants to admit they illegally wire-tapped your phones - the Lewinsky
scandal comes to mind, but Willey wasn't particularly bright).  FAXs
are intermediate - not as bad as e-mail, but not as off-the-cuff as
phone, and thus probably not as defensible, I would think.

John