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| Donald | Sep 11 2005, 05:07 AM |
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Elite member
  ![]](http://209.85.122.85/static/1/pip_r.png)
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Yep, that claim WAS made, but edited. Lots of traffic tonight, someone obviously thought better of it after they hit enter. It happens to me. 
I'm not worried about the random guy down the street. Every server that touches my email as it passes from me to the target has full access to the entire thing in plaintext. To put it in snailmail terms: Imagine if instead of the post office being a government organization, what if it was just a co-op kind of thing. In order to send a letter from, say, Florida to New York, I would just hand the letter to the first car I see driving down the street going north. That guy would take a quick peek at the address, see where it was headed, and would pass it on to the next vehicle he found that was going further north than he was. The letter would keep bouncing around that way until it actually ended up at the intended address in New York. BUT, now imagine that none of the letters being sent this way are in envelopes. Almost all of them are post cards. Now ANYONE in that long chain of cars and trucks can simply glance down at your letter and see every thing you have written. Correct me if I'm wrong guys, I'm not a networking specialist, but I do believe that is about how the internet email system works. All it takes is ONE unscrupulous guy in the chain of servers. Someone who decides he can make money selling email addresses to spammers, or selling marketing information to companies. For example, I bet you could sell a list of email adresses that sent an email in the last few days containing the phrase "I need a new car". *I* don't encrypt all me emails, but we really ought to. Encrypting every single email sent anywhere would greatly increase the security and privacy of the entire system. There are ways it could be adopted as a standard. |
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| The NSA May Read My Mail · Debates | |
1:51 AM Nov 26
