Privacy in the UK and Encrypted Email
Privacy is unfortunately going to hell in the UK and the Communications Data Bill will lead to government monitoring and storing of all emails. They say it's only of message metadata (send, recipients, etc) which is a bad enough privacy violation as is but there's very little to keep them from storing (or monitoring) entire emails.
In light of this development I took the time to set up a PGP key pair (although in the UK police can force you to divulge your encryption keys). If anyone would like to send me encrypted mail or other documents you can find my PGP public key at the MIT PGP repository, http://www.spintz.com/electron/JamesMHOakley_gpg_public_key.asc, or at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~electron/JamesMHOakley_gpg_public_key.asc. The key fingerprint is 07DC 8E4D 2C0A 140C A1AC 5ED2 5B95 068A 8C79 B6D2.
Email encryption/decryption can be facilitated with the Enigmail plugin for Thunderbird or with the FireGPG firefox extension which makes PGP encryption/decryption with gmail's web interface simple (assuming you trust those programs)
Addendum: I think it's a good idea to start using encryption routinely in email.
1) It makes us ready should legislation similar to what's in the UK is enacted here (although as I said in the UK you can be forced to divulge encryption keys, Tor is really one of the few viable solutions there, as no one person should have all the necessary information to construct exactly what's going on)
2) It makes sending sensitive data in emails a bit less risky. I always wince when people put credit card numbers in email for example
In light of this development I took the time to set up a PGP key pair (although in the UK police can force you to divulge your encryption keys). If anyone would like to send me encrypted mail or other documents you can find my PGP public key at the MIT PGP repository, http://www.spintz.com/electron/JamesMHOakley_gpg_public_key.asc, or at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~electron/JamesMHOakley_gpg_public_key.asc. The key fingerprint is 07DC 8E4D 2C0A 140C A1AC 5ED2 5B95 068A 8C79 B6D2.
Email encryption/decryption can be facilitated with the Enigmail plugin for Thunderbird or with the FireGPG firefox extension which makes PGP encryption/decryption with gmail's web interface simple (assuming you trust those programs)
Addendum: I think it's a good idea to start using encryption routinely in email.
1) It makes us ready should legislation similar to what's in the UK is enacted here (although as I said in the UK you can be forced to divulge encryption keys, Tor is really one of the few viable solutions there, as no one person should have all the necessary information to construct exactly what's going on)
2) It makes sending sensitive data in emails a bit less risky. I always wince when people put credit card numbers in email for example