Comment by plg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by plg | Hacker News Reader

As someone who followed Phil Zimmerman's epic battle with the US govt in the 1990s over PGP, I am seriously bummed by this news. For someone with as much personal conviction and moral depth as Phil Zimmerman to essentially pre-emptively give up on the idea of offering truly secure email, means to me, that the US government has now crossed a certain threshold that will be very very difficult to come back from.

Think about it. It's chilling. The idea that a paragon of privacy and encryption, not to mention a legend in terms of standing up to the government for freedom, has now said "I fold" to the simple idea that an American company offers true privacy of email communication.

How long before we have government installed microphones and cameras .... Oh never mind. It's already here.

Maybe Americans will have to get their privacy tools from other countries. Think about that for a second.

it doesn't have to be surrender. It could be an acknowledgement that email is insecure by nature, that there is no good way of making it completely secure, and wanting to keep people as safe as it is possible to do so. ie; it could be a move towards /more/ privacy by saying, here, use these other tools we have where we cannot be compelled to give the USG anything. If they were shutting down everything, I would be scared, sad, etc. Shutting down email they are essentially saying, we can't make this secure, and we don't want you thinking we can.

Very well put, thank you.

His claim was that it was intrinsically less secure, not that the government was stoping him

Which I would argue is correct. It seems to be intrinsically difficult (to say the very least) to have a communications system that is open to anyone to send messages to a given address (even if the sender is not known), and supports queueing messages for eventual delivery so that both ends don't have to be online at the same time.

The 'Pond' system mentioned elsewhere in this thread looks promising, for example, but that system doesn't allow for unknown people to send messages. This is perfect for many communications needs but can't supplant email entirely.

But I'll note if I'm reading the user guide [1] correctly that it's going to be very difficult to setup contacts, exchange messages, etc. in something like Pond, which would make its usage inherently suspicious (and liable for increased attention thereby, if we assume general domestic surveillance).

[1] https://pond.imperialviolet.org/user.html

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6183352

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