Why should you care about privacy on the internet?
- Do you mail your letters in envelopes
rather than using postcards?
- Do you care whether or not your e-mail
can be read by other people
besides the designated recipient?
- Have you ever hit that "send" button
with the wrong person in the "To:"
box and ended up embarassing yourself?
- Would you like to conduct business
communications via e-mail and be certain
of who you are dealing with, and be certain the contents of messages has
not been altered?
Whether or not you realize it, internet e-mail is inheriently insecure.
It is transmitted as readable asci text, and there are many places along its
delivery path where someone other than the intended recipient can read it.
Privacy in communication protects our right to free speech; that includes
privacy from the nosey system administrator and hacker, as well as privacy from
unwanted monitoring by the government.
Encryption provdes way to send email to people and ensure that only the intended
person is able to read it. PGPTM
is a freeware public key encryption program which enables you to
exchange email with military grade cryptographic protection.
A couple of years ago I put together a talk on this subject which
you can take a look at*
It's a little dated with respect to version numbers, but it discusses
the basic concepts of encryption and using PGP.
For more links, and to get the latest appropriate version of PGP,
as well as the alternative GnuPG,
check out the International PGP Page.
|
