Email/file Encryption nothing to hide?

[brainless 0]

According to a recently passed german law and a EU guideline, phone companies have to store all connection data (who called who and how long did the call take), ISPs are supposed to store who had which IP and browsed which sites for 2 years, short messages and eMails have to be stored for 6 months. At this time, only law enforcement agencies are supposed to be able to access these data sets in severe cases like when they suspect someone to be a terrorist, whatever that means these days.

well, this is going to be a huge data pool and huge amounts of data attract people who'd like to use this. Music and Movie Corporations would be interested in those internet connections which had more than let's say 150MB of traffic (it's hard to reach that by simply browsing the web like "normal" persons do), other law enforcement agencies might want to get this data in order to prosecute "minor" crimes, a boss might want to know who wrote an annoying piece of opinion online so they can warn and/or fire an employee - and some of these scenarios did happen already, I'll provide sources on request.

The saying is "Those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear", meaning that if you don't do anything illegal, you're not going to get in trouble. Since I've been assaulted by cops for no reason, I don't believe in this anymore, so what can I, what can we do about this?

One thing we can do is encrypting eMails since it is easy to run a search through plain text-Mails whereas an encrypted eMail has to be cracked first. With current home computers, it's possible to encrypt files strong enough so it would take ages to brute-force them with currently available technology, it should even be hard to do this for secret services...

...but why should you do this if you've got nothing to hide? well, especially the part about storing emails is a critical thing, this is just like "every postal service has to open every letter it transports, make a copy of it and keep it in its archives, available to anyone who gains access - with the feature that they can easily be used to create a profile about you. Without asking for your consent. Do you really want this?

You can get the Gnu Privacy Guard and Front-Ends for it on https://www.gnupg.org/ and, apart from a discussion on this topic, I'd like to know whether there are people around here who'd like to have a tutorial on how to set up the GnuPG, the one or other useful front end and <email client of your choice> to encrypt emails you write...

[Cerebral Stasis 0]

Sure, one may not have anything to hide, but browsing through one's personal information (such as emails and such) is an invasion of privacy and, under the Constitution, cannot be conducted without a search warrant, which requires a good reason to perform said search. Some may have something to hide, some may not, but if the government is allowed to break into one's personal information, before long one will find their rights being leached away through "small exceptions" that will eventually add up to be complete violations of rights.For example, would you want someone to read every letter, instant message, or email you've ever written, or listen to every phone conversation you've ever had? Chances are there would be some pretty embarrassing stuff in there somewhere, and that is why one has a right to privacy under the Constitution. Unless the government has a good reason to invade one's privacy, they should not be allowed to.

[brainet 0]

good but from my opinion there is no suchthing as privacy on the internet. Cause the minute the found the new stuff to increase the online privacy, the inute also some new hacker's tools been develope. its part of the law of nature. it happend in the nature it's also happend in the internet, cause the inter net user is tha part of nature infact. internet its self is apart of nature.

[rvalkass 5]

This was on TV last night in the UK, where we have the threat of us all having to carry ID cards contaiing loads of personal information. Would the people who initiated these plans be willing for me to keep all of their private emails? Probably not, so why should I let them keep mine? Various human rights documents state that we all have the right to freedoms of speech and expression without any form of hindrance, and we all have the right to privacy. The government reading your emails and then prosecuting you because you said something they didn't like seems to break these human rights.

Edited February 28, 2006 by rvalkass (see edit history)