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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

People shouldn't be accountable for their correspondence! That's the whole point of secure messaging!

Speech has consequences. Given the good done in holding rogue "politicians" accountable, not seeing that as axiomatically desirable is at least a little bit suspicious...

Private emails are not speech. Are you suggesting all private conversations should be public? That seems absurd to me. Do you subscribe to the "surveillance isn't bad if you have nothing to hide" concept?

Sending death threats or racial invectives by private message is as much speech as sending them by Twitter post.

All private conversations shouldn't be published. That isn't necessary to hold people accountable for dangerous or violent speech.

Publication and repudiation aren't the same thing.

There is no way to allow the verification of a death threat message without also allowing the verification of political dissidents, for example.

Yes, it might make it harder to punish death threats, but privacy is too important to sacrifice.

Let's see your mail spool. After all, how else can we know you're not having illicit conversations with politicians that we all deserve to know about?

Now you're just spouting non sequiturs. Publication and retention are two separate questions.

And not being a politician, and certainly not the one currently trying to hold the White House hostage, I don't see the public interest anyway.

I am not following... we are talking about gmail and email in general, not specifically the White House.

If you think White House emails should be signed and archived indefinitely, that is one thing. That is not what we are talking about.

But emails are meant to be accountable. They are the digital equivalent to sending letters. They should leave paper trails. Just like you have written before, secure messaging should be left to secure messaging apps, not email.

Woh, the idea that private letters shouldn't be private is WAY far away from the privacy standards that have been around in liberal democracies for centuries.

Mail being secure from surveillance is a foundational freedom.

I have no idea where you are getting the idea that we all should have to answer for what we send in private correspondence.

Letters and emails are private. DKIM does not change that.

This discussion about DKIM is about non-repudiation and the ability to prove that a certain person sent the email.

If you send me a letter, I (or someone else who gains possession of that letter) should be able to prove that you sent the letter and hold you accountable for the contents. DKIM does that for emails.

If you want to transfer assurance of the authenticity of an email to someone else, you can do so without DKIM; just sign a timestamp or something. The problem with current DKIM configurations is that it provides that assurance to everybody, including strangers who have no business having it. Which is why the ask here is for Google to do with DKIM what OTR does with MAC keys: burn them periodically, so that only people who have explicitly arranged to share authentication do so.

That seems less usable for the average email recipient. Most people who need to prove authenticity to a third party (eg of politically sensitive or offensive messages) aren't techies.

Too, it's easy to imagine not knowing you need proof until some time after you receive an email.

If it isn't usable and enabled by default, it won't be used in practice - for the same reason almost nobody uses PGP.

It's already common to use unsigned documents in court, as long as you can show provenance is legit or if the counterparty is willing to acknowledge authencity.

In fact, it's quite common that the issue over unsigned documents in court is the interpretation, not authencity.

I think the issue of having to teach users how to opt in to signing emails in potentially controversial cases is preferable to having to teach them how to handle email communications that are permanently provable (for starters, never ever again leave out a quote and never ever write ambiguously).

The author's suggestion, as I understood it, doesn't prevent this, it only prevents them from doing it beyond a certain point in the future.

If you got an email that warrants "holding someone accountable", you would have plenty of time before the keys are released. So if you receive an email and call the police, nothing would change.

What you couldn't do it save it for years and keep it as blackmail material / until it's politically opportune to use. Of course it's not as clear cut as that, and an email may look harmless at the time, and only later, with more context, you might realize it contains evidence of misdeeds. So even a good faith actor might unknowingly sit on evidence.

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