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Re: [perpass] Cops hate encryption but the NSA loves it when you use PGP

Stephen Farrell <stephen.farrell@cs.tcd.ie> Sun, 31 January 2016 19:13 UTC

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To: dcrocker@bbiw.net, Nicholas Weaver <nweaver@icsi.berkeley.edu>, "Matthijs R. Koot" <matthijs@koot.biz>
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From: Stephen Farrell <stephen.farrell@cs.tcd.ie>
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Subject: Re: [perpass] Cops hate encryption but the NSA loves it when you use PGP
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On 31/01/16 19:03, Dave Crocker wrote:
> 
> On 1/31/2016 10:53 AM, Stephen Farrell wrote:
>> Given that much
>> SMTP is now transmitted over TLS, I think the opportunity
>> for the likes of NSA to record all the PGP ciphertext has
>> to be have been significantly diminished.
> 
> 
> This depends on the degree of cooperation they get from operators, since
> TLS is only for one hop and the messages is in the clear at any
> SMTP-level transit points.

Sure. OTOH, it also means that the PGP ciphertext can no longer
be as easily extracted from almost any network tap, which used
be the case. And (absent an attacker) doesn't most mail these
days only tend to transit the public Internet in one hop? My point
is not that the current situation is perfect (it is not) but that
it is improving and vastly improved on what we had deployed that
got used 3 years ago. (IOW, I'm an optimist but hopefully not a
fansasticist:-)

S.

> 
> d/
> 
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