PGP problems

[Winfried Tilanus]

On Tue, 01 Aug 2000 18:50:40 +0100, David Gaskill wrote:

>It may of course be that most of the members of this list are senior 
>government  officials in sensitive posts or are able to cause the worlds 
>markets to plunge by merely touching a keyboard but my correspondence 
>is so boring that many people might pay not to read my e-mails... 
>
>I can't think of any other reason for your suggestion that everybody 
>should use PGP

Maybe not _everyone_, but far too little people that should use it, use
it. My girlfriend, for example, works in clinical research. She is
right on top of pile of corporate secrets and sensitive information
about patients. Her company doesn't use PGP at all.

Do those government officials in sensitive posts use PGP? Do they have
any idea that only the fact that they start encrypting their mail to
person X of Y might indicate that there is something going on between
them two? You can draw that conclusion, even when you can not decrypt
the mail, only by observing wether they send each other encrypted mail
or not.

The problem with e-mail is that everybody should assume that all the
network traffic is monitored by an untrusted party. So, if your
information might be interesting for somebody, take your measurements.



Best wishes,
Winfried

http://web.inter.NL.net/users/Winfried/