On Wed, 2005-08-17 at 17:31 +0100, James Wilkinson wrote:
> It is simple to monitor all traffic going through a router. It is quite
> possible to pick out all traffic that goes to port 25, or has an initial
> response that looks like an SMTP banner.
Technically correct, yet it exceeds the abilities of many ISPs/admins.
> The only way be certain that no-one is reading your e-mail (apart from
> the intended recipients) is to use known-to-be-secure cryptography.
Correct again, unfortunately only a small percentage of users are
technically fit to use encryption (PGP/GPG) at the application level.
Running your own SMTP server on the other hand also allows you to use
transport layer security.
> At the moment, all we have is thought-to-be-secure cryptography (notably
> GPG)[1]. But we don't know what the NSA, GCHQ and other government
> cryptanalysts can do.
At least we can reasonably believe that whatever they have is not ready
to decipher the thousands of messages transmitted each day.
Tom
--
T h o m a s Z e h e t b a u e r ( TZ251 )
PGP encrypted mail preferred - KeyID 96FFCB89
finger thomasz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx for key
Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic
forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as
the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively
in the interest of the ruling class - whether that class hereditary royalty,
oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.
Frank Herbert, Children of Dune
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