> I disagree with this general line of reasoning. It's certainly possible > to get someone to use an encryption tool without convincing them that > they want encryption.
I'm going to back Phil up on this one, because I think he's talking about a specific case rather than the general case. Making crypto (and security in general) invisible is the Holy Grail of usability. And yes, it is possible--but so far it's only been possible by enormous and fundamental changes to infrastructure. Think about just how many standards had to be adjusted, how much code tweaked, how much everything else, in order to make HTTPS transparent for end-users. OpenPGP today is basically in the SSL 1.0 era. Maybe someday we'll reach a Promised Land where SMTP is tightly integrated with OpenPGP and it's usable-by-default; but where we are right now, OpenPGP is definitely not integrated. People have to make a conscious choice to incorporate OpenPGP into their traffic habits, and before people will make that conscious choice they have to be willing to make the choice. And because of that, right now our target market is those who have made the conscious choice -- not those who haven't thought about it. > I also disagree with the general idea Robert put forward that "we" (who > is "we" here again?) do not evangelize. That was the official "we". Enigmail, the project, isn't an advocacy organization. You're not going to see us organizing a campaign to email Congress in advance of a bill, or putting together cool infographics to increase public awareness, or engaging in social-media campaigns. That's just not what we do. We don't have the resources for it, we don't have the expertise, and most of us lack the temperament. Groups like the EFF and the ACLU are wonderful and effective advocacy organizations: we leave evangelizing to them. _______________________________________________ enigmail-users mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe or make changes to your subscription click here: https://admin.hostpoint.ch/mailman/listinfo/enigmail-users_enigmail.net
