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Chilly...

I am sitting in a hotel in Cape Town and we are alternately getting rain, sun, wind and snow - every few minutes the outlook is different, but no matter what blows in, it remains chilly.  Right now, the sun is getting lower and there is a huge rainbow outside.  All of that made me think of the chilling effect of the 'Snowden Papers'.

Multiple mail and web sites have now shut down due to USA government pressure.  The latest casualty is Groklaw, a site that provided comments on legal issues pertaining to computers and technology. This is a sad chilling effect which will likely get worse before it will get better.

I am sorry to see you go PJ, but I can understand that you would rather retire at the sea side than in a prison, due to submissions other people sent to you.

This is of course ridiculous and in time someone will devise a technological solution to government over reach.  The building blocks already exist and I have mentioned some of them on this blog.  The problem is making a system that is easy to use and convincing everyone on the planet to use it, instead of plain text communications.

Update:

Email is broken by design, because it is asynchronous and uses central servers that cannot be secured.

Multiple groups have now seized upon Instant Messaging (XMPP, Jabber) instead, since it can be encrypted on the end points using Diffie Hellman key exchange and Asymmetric (public key) Encryption.

See these guys for example:
http://www.cryptoheaven.com/UserGuide/Secure-Instant-Messaging-CryptoChat.htm
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chatsecure-encrypted-secure/id464200063
http://pidgin-encrypt.sourceforge.net/
https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/
https://silentcircle.com/

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