[ale] PGP/GPG Keysigning party! ALE Central November 19th.

[Mills John M-NPHW64]

Katherine -

Excellent point.

A colleague remarked that the "3-letter" folks could break any encryption I was likely to use. True I'm sure. (So could Google, if they cared to!) However it takes some effort and some throughput, and part of that effort is targeting the traffic to decrypt. If most traffic is encrypted the effort:return ratio goes up substantially in favor of stealth.

Back in the early heyday of CB radio, a signal-theorist friend said the "Smokey Warning" traffic would be useless if 'Smokey' just put out a lot of bogus warnings. Either people would recognize the information content of those messages had dropped to a useless level and ignore them, or they would believe them and slow down. &8-)

Naturally your other point is also valid: most folks won't bother. Too bad - it would be very useful "chaff" in the larger picture.

 - Mills

-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org on behalf of Katherine Villyard
Sent: Wed 10/28/2009 11:11 AM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts - Yes! We run Linux!
Subject: Re: [ale] PGP/GPG Keysigning party! ALE Central November 19th.
 
However.  If you ARE going to send something secret--like, say, financial
junk, or your ISP emailing you passwords--that means that the only mail in
your inbox that's encrypted is the mail you don't want people to read.  Way
to be stealthy.

No, the way to be stealthy is to encrypt by default.  Then people don't know
which message is the super secret message, and waste time decrypting
pictures of your cats and your wife asking you to bring home milk looking
for the message with the secret stuff in it.

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