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Comment by just2n | Hacker News Reader

I did this for a long time, but it's really annoying:

1. If your provider goes down, you lose mail.

2. If you are conversing with people who are using an insecure mailer, such as gmail, Yahoo, etc (which is probably > 99.9% of all e-mail users), your e-mail is still accessible to the NSA, or to some Fortune 100 advertising company.

3. It's only a matter of time before the "big dogs" in email abuse the position and decide who is and isn't allowed to send/receive email outside of their little oligarchy, either on their own or at the behest of governments.

Like so much else that has been corrupted, we need to scratch the current architecture as too insecure, and build something truly secure for the future. This isn't in the interests of the Googles of the world, and it's actively in the worst interests of the NSA/FBI/CIA, so it's probably the right thing to do.

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"Like so much else that has been corrupted, we need to scratch the current architecture as too insecure, and build something truly secure for the future."

This is really the core technological issue that has enabled much of the recent mass spying: the Internet really was not designed with security, privacy, or anonymity in mind.

Remember that it started as a research network that was used primarily among academics. Academia is generally a very open and trusting environment. The last thing the inventors of the Internet though of was trying to protect their computers, data, or privacy. We are living with the consequences of that mistake.

The second major cause of this mess is the computer illiteracy and historical ignorance of much of the world's population. They don't understand how they are making themselves vulnerable by sharing so much information about themselves and trusting corporations that provide "free" web services to them. This is slowly changing for the better, as people become more technologically savvy and stories like the current spying scandals and various security breaches hit the news.

As for the technological and security minded among us, particularly those who are just now starting to think about running their own mail servers, what took you all so long? None of the recent revelations should have been unexpected.

The Internet needs a major privacy, security, and anonymity overhaul. If it's not rebuilt with those concerns at the core, they will all remain mostly illusory to the overwhelming majority of Internet users.

> It's only a matter of time before the "big dogs" in email abuse the position and decide who is and isn't allowed to send/receive email outside of their little oligarchy, either on their own or at the behest of governments.

Uh, what? We have the tools today. TLS to your mail server, PGP for your email content.

SMTP is already a highly distributed system that is controlled by no single entity. If the big email providers decide to block all the little players, making your own message passing system (with blackjack and hookers) and convincing everyone to come use it is many steps more work beyond just staying on SMTP and convincing everyone to stop using the big email providers. Then at least you don't have to develop new protocols, you don't have to develop new clients, and you don't have to convince people to use them (but still, good luck with that first step).

How about instead we just make email encryption a whole lot easier to use and promote email providers that aren't beholden to court orders (aka probable cause must be demonstrated at a minimum)?

Meanwhile we can work on reforming the security apparatus in the US because 'reasonable expectation of privacy" most definitely includes all the geographical locations I access my email account from, amongst many other things, so should require a warrant.

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