I am not surprised, but I am still dismayed, by the continued erosion of our personal privacy in the shadow of George W. Bush’s administration. The New York Times reports in E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress that the National Security Agency (NSA), as recently as early this year, is illegally collecting email from Americans:
Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns in Congress about the agency’s ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis, officials said. Supporting that conclusion is the account of a former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation.
A decade ago, I was a strong proponent of OpenPGP-encrypted email. I gave up when I got tired of trying to push that rope uphill. Maybe it’s time to try again.
Did you know that, unless you encrypt your email, it is as easy to read as a note written on a postcard? Now before you say, “So what? I don’t care,” consider how you would feel if NSA wanted to listen to all of your phone calls or wanted to read all of your regular mail. I suspect that, even though you are a law-abiding citizen and have nothing to hide, you might object a tad to that invasion of your privacy.
I have published my PGP key on this web site (and it is in the popular key servers). Using this key, you can send encrypted messages to me and you can confirm that messages which I sign electronically actually were signed by me.
I sign and encrypt my email messages using EnigMail and GnuPG (Gnu Privacy Guard) with Thunderbird, all highly reliable and free software. If you use something other than Thunderbird for your email (like Outlook or Eudora), here is a list of other mail user agent frontends. And if you use Gmail or any of the other email systems though a web browser, FireGPG is just the ticket.
Setting up the software is a little bit of work, but you will probably be done in less time than it would take you to drive to Office Depot and buy a box of envelopes. Once you have the software installed, you can encrypt an email message faster than you can lick and seal an envelope.
