Ian Grigg wrote:
the dissident and his life.... E.g., ... $2m per dissident.
Eh, sorry, $2m for a life?
Ummm I thought mail order brides were only $5000 :) Jokes aside I WOULD NEVER trust PKI for anything like that, simply because I don't trust most/all CAs regardless what auditing they've had. At the end of the day they're in it for the money not for security, not for the benefit of the human race, but simply what they can milk from commercial enterprise.
I have no doubt in my mind that Commercial CAs are highly susceptible to coercing from governments, not to mention the fact that certain governments no doubt had a pretty good hand in setting up some of the CAs, and some governments have choke points on their international traffic links...
Judging from the arrest the other week the NSA DOES scan emails in the clear regardless what the source and destination are...
Basically the horse has bolted on that one, we need to acknowledge the threat and realise the only solution to this in situations of people vs governments is using some means other then PKI...
Mind you if everyone used encryption it would make it a tad difficult to scan every single piece of email, so in effect the governments would be forced to restrict actions against only those they suspect rather then the public at large... Hell if spam was encrypted it could be annoying us to death and doing us a favour at the same time!
You could argue that dissidents should use PGP. But then, as I outlined, we are not just talking about dissidents, but about husband<->wife or anybody having anything *really* private in email, and that's almost anybody or at least 20% of the userbase. The value of privacy can't be expressed in dollars.
husband<->wife I'd say in 99% of cases neither of them couldn't even decode rot13... They'd see garbage and think it was corruption...
-- Best regards, Duane
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