Flashes of Panic

If you’ve been reading this for a while, you know I’m a (relatively) vocal advocate of the Mozilla Foundation and, in particular, its browsers Firefox and Camino.

You may also have noticed that I’m a booster of strong encryption, and the PGP/GPG model in particular. I haven’t made as much noise about it here, because while MacGPG and GPGMail make it very easy to use GPG with the Mail.app program on a Macintosh, I’ve had less luck finding easy-to-use encryption software for Windows without crippling license restrictions. (I was looking for an app to use at work, so the freeware PGP was out.) I didn’t want to nag everyone to use encryption and then have the Windows users hate me when the process was, well, less than simple.

Today I got a response to one of my grad-school networking messages which was encrypted with Enigmail, which turns out to be an extension for the email client of Netscape/Mozilla and for Mozilla’s excellent standalone mail client Thunderbird (the jargon is “MUA”, or Mail User Agent) which provides GPG functions.

By now you can guess where this is headed, right?

<?
include_once('/lib/evangelism/software.txt');
?>

With that out of the way, though, I have to ask: when will we see a webmail service that supports encryption? Never is my bet, for two reasons; one is practical and one is paranoid. First practical: in order to support encryption directly, the service would need a copy of the user’s private key, and (unless they were using a secure connection) the message plaintext, the key passphrase, or both would be transmitted in the clear over the ‘net. Both of those are security risks. Second, the paranoid: isn’t one of the big selling points of GMail (aside from the peer pressure aspect) that it indexes your mail, both to provide a search service to you and to target their revenue-producing advertisements? Widespread use of strong encryption breaks that. I can’t imagine Google encouraging that.

Will we need to remind Google not to be evil?

(I should add, for those wondering: my public key is here.)

Now playing: Brooklyn from The Fine Art Of Self Destruction by Jesse Malin