US law enforcement phone snooping on the rise

@Jaitch - - Re: Remember, most all electronic 'exchanges' have dial in taps, ...

"Get smart, use Phil Zimmermann's new Silent Circle cell app,..."

Except, for a limited few, it'll be ineffective as was/is PGP. In themselves, such products are fine, and PGP--which I've used--works excellently, but the problem is that they're not universally used by everyone.

If PGP were universally a part of email and messaging systems then everyone would require public/private keys but it'd mean that the encryption process was essentially transparent for all messages except for the initial creation of the key passphrase.

That secure messages/messaging are not secure has several problems: (a) people have not gotten used to encrypting messages so they don't use encryption even when available, (b) adding security to normal plaintext mail etc. is never totally straightforward--it's never just a one-click operation hence it's not used except by the cognoscenti who definitely need it, (c) thus, as encryption is not used by everyone, those that do use it can be signaled out for doing so.

Encrypted messages stand out like dogs' balls: that they can't be read in plaintext puts a glowing neon sign on them which says 'I'm hiding something', thus they're automatically drawn to the attention of authorities even when messages are perfunctory and innocuous.

Perhaps I'm just suspicious. Unlike the conspiratorially-mined, normally, I consider government 'conspiracies' to be 99% fuck-ups and perhaps 1% conspiracies; but with respect to email etc. it seems just too convenient for authorities that most mailers and messaging systems are plaintext by default--remember financial transactions via your browser are the opposite--automatically encrypted. 20+ years on from beginning of the Net, so why one encrypted and not the other?

Re: Easy

The logic works like this

The Homeland Security Drones were talking among themselves: "We're invaded the privacy of 1.3M people and found didley-squat. This idea is a crock of shit, and it stinks

So the Drones went to their Supervisors and said, "Look this spying on out neighbours is useless, we've found fuck-all and it just pisses off the ordinary people".

So the Supervisors reported to the Managers, saying, "We've found no evidence of terrorist activity and nobody likes it"

So the Managers reported to the Directors, saying, "We've stopped any terrorist activity ever taking place and the terrorists don't like the methods we use"

So the Directors spoke amongst themselves, "We've defended our country and what we do actively prevents terrorism"

So the Directors then went onto the Politicians and said to them "we have secured out country from terrorist attack, lets do more of it".

So the Politicians issued press releases and made speeches telling the proles them that we are winning the war on terror and then asked the special advisors for more ideas and plans.

Then one of the special advisors said "I'm also on the payroll of I know of of a company that makes body scanners"

The president looked upon the new plan, and saw that it was good, and the plan became policy.