-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I predict that nearly every company which enforces the PGP 5.5 corporate snoopware will in fact routinely convert every incoming and outgoing message to plaintext for searching by keywords, topics, etc. This would be analogous to every phone call, incoming and outgoing, being recorded. Except that instead of having security people _listen_ to each recording, the messages can be glanced at quickly, marked for further review, compiled into dossiers, or searched for the keywords of interest to the security people. (Please note that I am not saying such phone call or e-mail monitoring is illegal, or should be illegal. A property owner is free to define his own policies for how he uses his own property. This includes company phones, company computers, and even the time of employees while they are on his premises. The issues are not the legality or ethicality of such recordings and monitorings, but the dangers. And whether people such as ourselves should help build or deploy such surveillance capabilitities. Or work for companies with such surveillance policies.) I further predict that this will actually _increase_ the amount of e-mail surveillance being done. Whereas today it is of course easy for companies to surveil unencrypted employee mail, I doubt that most of them do. But the adoption of snoopware like PGP 5.5 will raise the consciousness of company security people. "Hmmhh, maybe we ought to buy some of those e-mail keyword analyzers and combine them with our new purchase of PGP 5.5? If our employees are encrypting, we'd better keep tabs on them." By building in such easily-enforceable snooping capabilities, and by building in such things as the ability to reject even _incoming_ e-mail which has failed to encrypt to the corporate key (as I understand the product), this greatly moves us toward a surveillance era. Is this what "Pretty Good Privacy" really stands for? - --Tim May The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography - ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway." -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP for Personal Privacy 5.0 Charset: noconv iQA/AwUBND+11FK3AvrfAt9qEQKOZQCdFRS6Ogl3da7TDFxmFF7E9kE16RsAoPaG iFjXzww6H5c1no3iYGvL6BGD =wt4J -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----