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I agree wholeheartedly with all of the points you're trying to make but the spoken word / snailmail comparison is broken and detract...

I agree wholeheartedly with all of the points you're trying to make but the spoken word / snailmail comparison is broken and detracts from your message. Saying that spoken word and snail mail are unencrypted and thereby implying that we should be no more worried about unencrypted digital traffic than we are about our real-world conversations is a harmful analogy, because it's evidently superficially true, but it implies that accessing your bank account over HTTP is no more dangerous than saying your credit card number in the street. That analogy would hold if every conversation that we have (or letter we send) could be recorded, filtered and searched at scale by anyone who cared enough to do so. In reality, using encrypted web communication is more analogous to real-world conversation - if somebody is particularly interested in what you, individually, are doing or saying then barring significant efforts on your behalf, they can probably get access to it but encryption, and analogously the security afforded by the difficulty of overhearing people's conversations in real life, prevents widespread, untargeted surveillance that would make, for example, automated harvesting of bank details, or the identification of people interested in a particular political movement trivial.

Posted by gearhart on Apr 20, 2015, 11:30 AM

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I agree wholeheartedly with all of the points you're trying to make but the spoken word / snailmail comparison is broken and detract...

gearhartApr 20, 2015, 11:30 AM

I agree wholeheartedly with all of the points you're trying to make but the spoken word / snailmail comparison is broken and detracts from your message. Saying that spoken word and snail mail are unencrypted and thereby implying that we should be no more worried about unencrypted digital traffic than we are about our real-world conversations is a harmful analogy, because it's evidently superficially true, but it implies that accessing your bank account over HTTP is no more dangerous than saying your credit card number in the street. That analogy would hold if every conversation that we have (or letter we send) could be recorded, filtered and searched at scale by anyone who cared enough to do so. In reality, using encrypted web communication is more analogous to real-world conversation - if somebody is particularly interested in what you, individually, are doing or saying then barring significant efforts on your behalf, they can probably get access to it but encryption, and analogously the security afforded by the difficulty of overhearing people's conversations in real life, prevents widespread, untargeted surveillance that would make, for example, automated harvesting of bank details, or the identification of people interested in a particular political movement trivial.

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