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Email Self-Defense – a guide to fighting surveillance with GnuPG

emailselfdefense.fsf.org

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Re: Email Self-Defense – a guide to fighting surveillance with GnuPG

#2

Post by atmosx »

I get and send ~ 10 to 15 emails per week. Not even 1 of my regular 'correspondence' uses GnuPG. It's too complicated to setup and even harder to use for avg Joe, like bitcoin, he has to spent time understanding totally new concepts. And no one is willing to do that, unfortunately :-(

Re: Email Self-Defense – a guide to fighting surveillance with GnuPG

#3

Post by sssbc »

atmosx wrote: post #2

I get and send ~ 10 to 15 emails per week. Not even 1 of my regular 'correspondence' uses GnuPG. It's too complicated to setup and even harder to use for avg Joe, like bitcoin, he has to spent time understanding totally new concepts. And no one is willing to do that, unfortunately :-(

ok, get info-raped by any and all then.

Re: Email Self-Defense – a guide to fighting surveillance with GnuPG

#4

Post by mapgrep »

The very first step, assuming you already have an email account, for all platform pages:

>INSTALL THE ENIGMAIL PLUGIN FOR YOUR EMAIL PROGRAM

I Googled Enigmail as I was not familiar with it. It is "a security extension to Mozilla Thunderbird and Seamonkey." This seems incredibly shortsighted. Tons of people out there are on Outlook, Apple Mail, Gmail, etc. and not interested in Thunderbird.

There are other options, for example the surprisingly EXCELLENT gpgtools.org installer for Mac, which makes it super-easy to add signing and encrypt/decrypt and key management to OS X and Apple Mail. A quick Google reveals the nicely packaged gpg4win.org (I haven't used it). There's also Google's new Gmail GPG plugin (although yes it's beta) https://code.google.com/p/end-to-end/

I know this is the FSF, but I'd hope in the interest of defeating the surveillance state they could set aside dogma.

(Also, that page shouldn't default to the Linux options when I'm visiting from a Mac browser.)

Re: Email Self-Defense – a guide to fighting surveillance with GnuPG

#6

Post by feralmoan »

I'm still constantly surprised that this feature isn't ubiquitously built into mail clients by default and users don't get a big 'enable encryption' button which automates sane defaults/manages the keychain transparently. It doesn't seem like such a complicated abstraction that it needs so much manual setup

Re: Email Self-Defense – a guide to fighting surveillance with GnuPG

#7

Post by pyre »

sssbc wrote: post #3
atmosx wrote: post #2

I get and send ~ 10 to 15 emails per week. Not even 1 of my regular 'correspondence' uses GnuPG. It's too complicated to setup and even harder to use for avg Joe, like bitcoin, he has to spent time understanding totally new concepts. And no one is willing to do that, unfortunately :-(

ok, get info-raped by any and all then.

Consider this:

1. It's probably better to remain civil in your discourse if you want people to take you seriously, and not just dismiss you as a troll. If you really do feel so strongly about your position, then you're probably doing more harm than good to your cause by firing off such remarks.

2. I doubt that you personally communicate with everyone using encrypted email. If you do, your world is probably fairly insular (and you should probably consider expanding your experience to include communicating with people outside of your comfort-zone).

3. The most constructive response to the parent post would probably be a suggested plan of action. I'm sure that many here would be all-ears to even a decent framework for convincing the average person to use encrypted email.

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