[northwest]

Email encryption is a good start!

Personally, I think, the user is best served with the "darknet" [0] approach.

It's unfortunate that term "darknet" leads a big chunk of the general public to believe it's something "dirty", "illegal" or otherwise undesirable or even dangerous, which doesn't help its cause. So help the Internet out and spread the word:

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_%28file_sharing%29

RetroShare [1] is one of them and has the advantage of being the all-in-one encryption solution (VOIP, chat, messages, file sharing), while encrypting everything. It also eliminates the meta data problem which encrypted email has.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroshare

EDIT: Direct link - http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/

[steveklabnik]

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

[northwest]

Now I'm curious about how you're applying this to the current context... Care to explain?

[mseebach]

He likely means that email encryption (the good) is incrementally achievable, while RetroShare and Darknet (the perfect) requires a much more disruptive change.

[northwest]

Ok.

I'd just like to add to that:

Very serious attacks on democratic principles have been carried out behind our backs, for a very long time, apparently.

That is why I think, in order to counter these threats to society appropriately, disruptive approaches should really be welcomed and preferred as often as possible.

And then, of course, it's not an either/or question. Both should be promoted alongside, as lots of different people have lots of different needs/requirements. (Personally, I use both RetroShare and encrypted email, and migrate as many people as possible over to total encryption as soon as possible.)

[mseebach]

Email encryption is going to be effective against 99% of relevant attacks, and if the NSA wants to know what you're doing, they'll put a bug in your laptop and, no, you won't notice.

Remember, even with lofty "serious attacks on democratic principles" going on, you're still infinity times more likely to have your bank account information stolen by drive-by script kiddies with a 0-day than be a target of government persecution on the back of illicitly obtained intelligence. Even then, it's highly unlikely that even the NSA has the capacity to decrypt internet traffic at scale.

[northwest]

I know, I know, I don't even consider myself a target, at all. I don't really do this to just protect myself.

It's just that we should all do our best in order to erect the collective hurdle that the mass surveillance efforts now require. There's nothing lofty about democracy being attacked, it's very real. And don't forget that you can't really do encryption on your own, you depend on all your contacts doing it, too. Society needs to make that as normal as brushing their teeth.

[steveklabnik]

Yup.

To be clear: encryption _needs_ to be perfect. But "let's fork the web" is a pipe dream, "let's start encrypting emails" is quite achievable.