Point missed.
That whooshing sound is the point going over the previous posters' comments. I used OTR when I had a friend in China, who worked for their telecom company. He helped install parts of the 'great firewall of china', but being an ex-pat, still wanted to talk to his buddies at home. Said firewall does a lot of keyword searching and other such, but it isn't exactly an intelligent beast. Much like the Great Transparent Proxy that the USA uses (funny, nobody considers that...), it is designed for bulk collection and processing and when we were using it, OTR was a very niche thing nobody really knew about -- thus the GFOC wouldn't notice or flag encrypted communication over a protocol and configuration that it was looking at as plain text: It would just see a long stream of random characters that wouldn't match any of its filters.
Software like this isn't just for 'criminals' or 'terrorists'... it's also for the people who are well aware of the surveillance in the world and simply want to be left alone. My friend wasn't engaged in some clandestine intelligence operation... mostly, we just talked about video games, caught up on what people were doing back here he knew when he was state-side... very ordinary stuff. But in an era where bringing a fingernail clipper on a plane can get you years in prison, even the most mundane things can become a danger when an overzealous government thug sees an automated alert and, lacking any higher level brain function, roflstomps his way all over some innocent person's face.
We don't live in civilized society anymore. We need tools like this. Everyone does -- because even if you are the kind of naive idiot who thinks your government is the best simply because *you* were born under it... there's over two hundred other governments filled with the same kind of naive idiots, and very likely think *you* are the enemy. Unfortunately, this level of stupidity is exceedingly common... and while I'd love to put them in a room together and let them wallow in their mutual stupidity -- I have to live on this planet too.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
