On Sat, Jul 21, 2001 at 02:45:36AM -0700, Vineet Kumar wrote: > The real question is: To whom is the message encrypted? Anybody on the > Internet can access it, but probably only one person can read it. I > suppose that's one way of keeping the spooks in the dark about who > your covert contacts are...
The spooks don't really put much effort into looking in your mail. The much maligned echelon "eavesdropping" spook system mostly notes who sends any mail to who. A few years ago, I visited the nsa webpage and followed some link to a publicly visible project. It was a huge computing system, to do calculations on sparse matrices, to be used for processing of "astronomical data". Ever since, I've been wondering what eigenvector my ip address has. So you see, they don't need to know what you're writing, because they already do, as they know who you're writing it to. "Let a thousand eigenvectors bloom", to paraphrase an infamous Chairman. Cheers, Joost