FWIW In the Si biz, its quite common to encrypt files. I've seen (albeit lame, and with guessable passwords) zip encryption and the classic crypt used. Between engineers, and between lawyers and engineers. Typically the encrypted info is an attachment to unencrypted email (often describing its contents!), though this is also used for ftp sites. (The zip programs are considered universal today.)
When we were working on a crypto chip (ca 1998), we did actually manage to have half a dozen engineers/managers regularly using PGP, between Macs and PCs. That's since faded to nil. Thinking about this, I conclude that email is considered useful because its *so* easy to send. Adding non-transparent decryption is too much of a bother. (Though the way that later PGP versions can retain your passphrase *can* make it transparent (at a security-cost of retaining your passphrase!)) Maybe it'll take an ISP-snoop-based "insider" trading scandal for the SEC to require email crypto :-) Version issues haven't been a problem with PGP, but we had to find the right versions of PGPfone to interoperate between Mac/PCs. At 11:01 PM 11/2/02 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: >"Prior to that, the encrypted email I've sent in the past year or so has >almost always failed, because of version incompatibilities," > >While in Telecom I was auditing optical transport gear, and we adopted the >practice of encrypting all of our audit reports to vendors. Of course, the >chance of there being an eavesdropper (uh...other than NSA, that is) was a >plank energy above zero, but it gave the vendors the imporession we really >cared a lot about their intellectual property (if we determined a problem >with their equipment, and if that info ever leaked, it could have a major >impact on them). >That the mesages were decrypted I know for sure, and it was easy for the >customers: we would verbally tell them the password for unpacking the >encrypted file, and they merely typed it in a it extracted itself. >I think the encryption tool was installed directly into the file manager (or >whatever it's called now), so it was easy to do.
