[LINK] UN declares that the right to privacy,

[Kim Holburn]

On 2013/Dec/18, at 6:10 PM, stephen at melbpc.org.au wrote:

> Jim writes,
> 
>> This (U.S. court challenge) actually seems a little more hopeful than
>> individual encryption actions (most people won't do this stuff) ...
> 
> 
> Maybe. Although I respect this opinion, personal responsibility matters.
> 
> Indeed Jim, you and anyone can have state-of-the-art email privacy right 
> now, without doing anything radically difficult or special.

If you can find a secure email server.

> If you use a 
> fairly modern browser and use Google Gmail with this browser.

See right there you have a problem. Several.  1. Google was a target of the NSA and they got/are getting a lot of internal google data by listening at the interconnects between google's warehouses.  Google has just now started encrypting those connections but they were all going in the clear.  2. google itself uses your data.  It might be that it scans every one of google your emails with AI tech so that it can send you targeted ads, so that it can track every use you make of the web (with google search and google analytics).  

> Your email
> will be sent & received with forward private encryption from the browser.

Yeah, it will go to only google.

> If you send your email to another free Gmail account and they also use a 
> modern browser then ALL the email will be strongly encrypted ALL the way.
> 
> Microsoft Outlook will also implement a forward privacy, apparently soon.
> 
> It won't matter who or what listens unless they can break the encryption.
> 
> And right now breaking https takes time and processing grunt, and is very 
> unlikely for domestic and small/medium business communications. With your
> normal virus checking and a deleted browser history for your win computer 
> anyway, this is about as good privacy as it currently gets. Doing such is 
> hardly onerous. But will certainly agree with the rest of your Link email.

You still have to trust the server.  I'm not entirely against google, you just have to understand that you are giving your private information away to a huge company.  A company that gives you stuff for free?  Sure.  Like someone said:  If a company gives you stuff for free you are not its customer, you are its product.

We know that recently google dobbed in a gmail user for having child-porn.  Not that I'm unhappy about that, but it seems it found this out by letting its AI scan everyone's emails and images.
http://boingboing.net/2013/11/26/google-turns-in-child-porn-own.html

>> or a quaint demand that
>> government surveillance just stop.  Surveillance will become increasingly
>> easier, smarter and normal over time as we become surrounded by smarter
>> interacting systems.  These systems have benefits but they are prone to
>> misuse, on purpose or though zealous incompetence.  It seems much better 
> to
>> me to develop that there are baseline rules of what is acceptable and 
> what
>> is not - and back it up with some serious/extreme penalties for
>> transgressions - rather than imagining that world should or could revert 
> to
>> some mythological pre-Internet age of information naivety.
>> 
>> I'm not sure about this but I also appear to have a different scale of 
> harm
>> to most people of organisations that might be tracking me: I'd put the 
> NSA
>> somewhere near the bottom.  Off the top of my head, something like:
>> criminal organisations (clearly the worst), random shadowy uncontrolled
>> companies, big name companies with a brand to support, the NSA (etc), the
>> Australian government.  The NSA appear to have achieved about nothing 
> with
>> their zillion dollar surveillance operation except pissing a lot of 
> people
>> off and promoting privacy awareness.
>> 
>> - Jim
>> _______________________________________________
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>> Link at mailman.anu.edu.au
>> http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
> 
> 
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> 
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> 
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-- 
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
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