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I was not at the conference and know nothing about any of
the accusations made, but thought I would post a quick reply regarding Dale’s
comments on network monitoring and e-mail security. I explain e-mail privacy to my clients like this: Sending an e-mail is like mailing a postcard that gets
scanned, indexed and filed at every stop and by anyone that touches it, and of
course there is no control in the path that it takes from getting from point A to
point B. If your e-mail goes across the public internet, you should
always assume your e-mail is going to be read by someone else. If you don’t want others to have access to it, you
have to encrypt it, and then this is just an inconvience for someone that
really wants to read it.� I think with a typical fast desktop machine, it takes
less than a week to crack 128bit encryption.� Rumor has it that there are machines
that can do it in 48 hours. Same goes for websites you visit.� Any decent firewall logs
every place that is visited, and can also log content.� If you don’t want
others to see the content, make sure you are on an https connection, but it
will still know what site you visited. I think someone would have to be very na�ve to think that internet
access on an unsecured wireless network at a conference would not be monitored
by someone.� Now what the information collected gets used for is an entirely
different subject. Laws on governing privacy on the internet are almost non
existent with the exception on collecting personal information from minors. Troy Sosamon� |
