Encouraging email security.

[Mark H. Wood]

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On Sun, 18 May 2003, Wolfgang Bornath wrote:
> I'm one of Joes or Harrys of the unwashed masses. Most of my friends and
> aquaintances are. We exchange mails, we post to newsgroups and/or
> mailing lists. In 99% of all cases those mails and postings never
> consisted of 'sensitive' or even 'embarrassing' material. It is very
> difficult to reason with something which is not there.

This points indirectly to part of the problem:  people tend to associate
cryptography with secrecy only.  But OpenPGP and S/MIME also do signing.
Maybe you don't send sensitive or embarrassing material, but what if
someone else sent embarrassing statements, and put your name at the bottom
and your address in the header?

I usually don't have any secrets to hide, but I don't want to be
misrepresented, and I'd sign everything I send if I wasn't embarrassed to
have you all find out that I haven't yet collected a single nonself
signature on my key -- oops! :-/

> I used PGP and am now using GnuPG in Linux. But just the other week I
> tried to convince a neighbor to use signing and en-/decryption. "Why
> should I? Everybody can read what I'm writing. There's nothing I have
> to hide! I'm not a crook or such!"

I'm not a crook either; I want to use encryption to give the crooks a hard
time!

- -- 
Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer   mwood@IUPUI.Edu
MS Windows *is* user-friendly, but only for certain values of "user".
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