Email Privacy

Mr. Steven Warshak appears to have all the hallmarks of a total slime ball.¹ The fact that he certainly appears to deserve being locked up does not justify violating his civil rights though, and that is why the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are defending him. I feel for the guy, I really do. Nearly every email user out there has this mental picture of email as a replacement for paper letters that you get in the mail in envelopes. The sort that you have a legal and even realistic expectation of privacy, that no one except you and the recipient might possibly find and reveal the information in them.

Unfortunately this conception of email is utterly wrong. Worse, everyone who is actually understands how email works knows this. That our users do not is in some cases an example of willful ignorance and in others a failure on our parts. Most people using email never had any real explanation of it, only in a few cases has its relationship to postcards been explained and ignored.

For this reason, a good number of computer people use the PGP² or GPG³ (equivalent, compatable systems created by different groups) to encrypt their email. A smaller group, not fully trusting that system, but wanting equivalent privacy, use Tiger Envelopes.⁴ Either of these provide reasonable levels of privacy, effectively enclosing your email in an envelope.

Without that, your email really is like a post card, and when stored on a server that is not your own, why should you expect that no one else would read it? You do not have that level of control or security when it comes to real post cards. People need to learn this. They could handle encryption, it really is not that hard, especially in the relatively non-authenticating forms (that is, forms of encryption that ensure that only you and the sender can read something, but do not tell you who the sender is).

Ignorance is no excuse. For reference, my public key is here.