[3140] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Top Pentagon official declares no one has a right to secrecy.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (nobody@nsm.htp.org)
Tue Aug 4 21:34:41 1998
Date: 5 Aug 1998 00:29:12 -0000
To: cryptography@c2.net
From: nobody@nsm.htp.org
>>>>> Nelson Minar <nelson@media.mit.edu> writes:
> People don't use PGP casually. It's not that it's too hard to set
> up, it's just too much trouble to bother with.
Few of us routinely sign postings to public fora, as the rationale for
doing so is rather thin; this is certainly no reflection on PGP's ease
of use (or lack thereof).
Many more of us use PGP for everyday email, and I would guess that
most of the readers of this list use encryption as a matter of course
for routine communication with business and political associates. If
one chooses a mail client with decent PGP integration, the routine use
of encryption is no more trouble than having to lick the flap of an
envelope.
I communicate daily with grassroot teams working in third-world
countries around the world. All of our email is PGP-encrypted, both
individual messages and digests. We have had no problem explaining
the use of Pegasus mail and PGP (and our related scripts) to Ruwandan
women with a primary-school education, so I have a hard time believing
that it could cause much trouble for the average American.
IMHO, the big obstacles are
- Lack of built-in PGP encryption in the tools popularly used for
email (web browsers, Win95 mail clients, AOL);
- Lack of public awareness (interest?) of the benefits of encryption;
- Fragmented and poorly-publicised network of PGP public key servers.
(If the default behaviour for mail clients was to suggest PGP
encryption, for instance, we would see much more widespread use.)
But if it's too much trouble for the readers of this list to
contribute to overcoming these obstacles, we won't have much to say
when Hamre's 'security environment infrastructure' is erected over our
heads.
