On Tue, 10 Feb 2015 04:47:38 -0800, Gilles Chehade <[email protected]>
wrote:
People actually open an account at Gmail/Yahoo/Microsoft because they do
not give the slightest shit about these privacy concerns. They want mail
that gets sent when pressing a button, and they want it so bad that even
when most ISP provide an email address you can fetch with POP/IMAP, they
go for Gmail/Yahoo/Microsoft because the webmail is simpler than dealing
with the configuration of Outlook / Thunderbird.
Get real, these people do not care about your concerns, they will go for
the simplest solution and you will never convince them that they have to
setup PGP, remember yet another passphrase for a keypair they need to be
careful with, just so they can send an email... when the alternative can
just be pressing a button.
I think Gilles observations are borne out by reality. PGP is without
question a powerful tool but it's a terrible tool IMO for anyone but the
technically minded and OpSec disciplined.
Clay Shirky wrote a great article that I always circle back to when I see
these debates: The RIAA Succeeds Where the Cypherpunks Failed
http://www.shirky.com/writings/riaa_encryption.html
Long story short the 'Eat your peas' approach has been and continues to be
a miserable failure.
Gilles is right, the vast majority of the email using population does not
give two shits about security or surveillance. This is no longer debatable
two years after the Snowden leaks began. How many non-technical people do
you know that have dropped their PRISM-approved email provider since then?
Crikey, half the people on the mailing lists I subscribe to are still
using gmail accounts, it's pathetic.
If we want to live in a world where people have some semblance of computer
security and protection from surveillance, the people writing the software
must build these features into software products so that they are baked
in, impossible to disable, fail closed, and completely transparent to the
end user.
Any other approach is doomed to failure as far as I can tell.
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