Do you care if they read political dissidents’ emails? People who would like to change the status quo? Would you care if someone like a modern day MLK were blackmailed into dismantling his movement due to some embarrassing secrets the government found in his email? Do you care that the specter of NSA spying has chilling effects on the free speech of people who are not criminals, nor dangerous in any way?
Then encrypt your email to provide cover to people more in need of secrecy than yourself. “I have nothing to hide” is a horrible cop out.
Not to mention that everyone commits several crimes a day. This basically opens the way for arbitrary arrests of whoever the government deems “undesirable”. You can’t be sure you won’t fall into that category one day, so it pays to support everyone’s privacy today, lest you require it one day when it’s not there.
There are encrypted email transmission protocols (STARTTLS) and they are used quite extensively. If STARTTLS is used, the email cannot be easily intercepted in transmission. It is as secure as SSL, which, if used correctly, is unbreakable with current computer speeds.
Yes, I should have qualified this: a 128-bit key SSL protocol, if implemented properly (that is, without using RC4), cannot be cracked in any reasonable amount of time using any known method using modern computers (or even computers that are a million times faster).
Umm, wow, this was unexpected. I was talking about me personally. I am not a terrorist or political dissident, nor do I have any plans to become one. I keep my political opinions to myself, because my political opinions are not popular these days.
I don’t see how massively parallel computation is of any help here; it suffers from the same limitations that classic computing does: no matter how much we raise speed, eventually you hit a wall.
It’s true that encryption methods that depend on integer factorization would be theoretically vulnerable to quantum computing. A guy named Peter Shor proved that on a quantum computer, integer factorization runs dramatically more efficiently than on a classical computer.
But integer factorization is not the only way to manage encryption. McEliece with Goppa codes, for example, is immune to Shor’s attack.
And if you want to be ridiculous about it, a “multi-prime” RSA with 231 4096-bit primes provides 2[sup]100[/sup] security against quantum attacks.
I give the NSA my password unless there was a reason that made sense to me, and that wouldn’t include ‘Just in case we need it someday’. Also, there are plenty of unbreakable encryption schemes. It’s public key encryption that can be broken, private key systems can be made impossible to crack, they just aren’t convenient.
Don’t take it personal, please. My point is that even if you have “nothing to hide” (which is a terrible argument, by the way, please read my link), you should take steps to secure your privacy for the sake of others and those who come after us.
And you admit that you censor yourself online because you hold unpopular opinions? You’re making my point for me.
That strikes me as asking if evolution is true, why are there still monkeys. Some are missed, but some are not. We hear about the ones they didn’t catch, not the others
To be honest, I wouldn’t even know how to encrypt it. I use a free email service like Yahoo or Gmail. I send stuff, I get stuff. How would I even encrypt that?
That was encrypted using a 128 bit key in 1977 and decrypted maybe a decade ago. Computers keep getting faster and faster. But with a 512 bit key there is no known way of cracking before the sun becomes a red giant.
But that “known” comes with 2 caveats. A quantum computer could destroy the RSA algorithm (using primes). Second, NSA might have already solved the factorization problem (which is likely not NP complete) and is keeping it secret.
Would a quantum computer be able to crack RSA type codes made using elliptic curves? Does anybody here know?