> It’s only as secure as a postcard because people don’t bother to use cryptographic tools that are readily available.
True, but explaining that (and the limits of encryption) required a bit more effort that a two-sentence post.
True enough SA. It's something I've been giving some thought to. Every time I start writing something up though, it just seems to go on and on. That seems to happen to me more as I've gotten older. :-)
What's really getting to me about the entire topic though is that no matter what is said, no matter how far the government flushes the 1st,4th and 5th amendments down the drain, people are just simply too lazy to be able to handle public key cryptography. Can you imagine the average person out there could handle properly securing his private keyring? These are the same folk, who can't even figure out what a directory structure is on a computer, and we want them to take enough care, that they wouldn't end up emailing their private keyring to any moron who asked for it? That's not to mention the problem of key expiration, and revokation.
OTOH, even if you wanted strong crypro on your phone, would you really trust it not to rat you out to the NSA the first chance it got? I know that I don't really trust my smartphone.