It's ironic that the State itself will finally provide a clear reason to the masses for using strong crypto.
The fatherland defense hysteria is fueling the privacy concerns - and mainly because people are afraid of errors when humonguous apparatus starts sifting through their data. It is like situation when a pig enters the highway: you know that he will stop someone in the next few minutes no matter what - you just don't want to be there. I have been asked about PGP more often in the last few months by god-fearing and law-abiding than in the last few years. This is a good sign. The down side is the concern that they will be doing something unusual. Since there is no mass use of PGP, crypto users do stand out - all 23,000 of us regular users worldwide are well mapped, charted and identified. I don't have a good answer for this. What novice users really want is ANONYMOUS use of crypto, so that they don't raise flags. Then I have to explain about anonymous remailers, whose reliability is nowhere near regular smtp e-mail. The only remaining option is use of public-access internet terminals. (unrelated, I noticed that there is no un-crippled free version of PGP for windows XP any more - 8.0 beta expired) What are the possible technical solutions ? Virus that automagically installs and configures pgp? It would provide an excellent excuse to many. Someone mentioned software that would monitor mail traffic (via 802.11* ?) and send "I can see you" e-mails to all (From, To, Cc) parties. But I feel that the real solution will be detentions of non-combatants based upon erroneus interpretations of the captured traffic.
