But if you send emails back and forth encrypted in PGP, the existence of your communications will be known, even if the content is not.
The FBI could get a search warrant, go to your house, copy your keystore, and install a keylogger on your computer. This would enable them to obtain your private key when you typed in the passphrase to your keystore.
Of course, there are ways to guard against this. How paranoid are you? Is your computer case secured by a lock? Do you store your keyboard in a safe when you are away?
If you want to see real paranoia, look at the Google archive of alt.anonymous.messages. Hundreds of encrypted posts appear every day. No one knows who they are from, no one knows who they are to. Someone, somewhere has a key that will read them, and maybe he does so. It would be easy enough to call them up anonymously at a public computer, and copy them to a thumb drive for later decryption.
I rarely have to encrypt anything in an email, and when I do I only encrypt the part I'm concerned about. My correspondents are all people I would readily acknowledge as such.
> The FBI could get a search warrant, go to your house, copy your keystore, and install a keylogger on your computer. This would enable them to obtain your private key when you typed in the passphrase to your keystore.
Of course they could. But I don't think they will bother. I live in the woods on a rural hillside in upstate NY. I don't make trouble for anybody. I like privacy in my lifestyle, and occasionally in my communications, that's all.
> Of course, there are ways to guard against this. How paranoid are you? Is your computer case secured by a lock? Do you store your keyboard in a safe when you are away?
If I thought there was a chance of that, I would, or perhaps I'd just find another way to deal with my computing needs. As it is, there is very little chance that they know about me, much less care about what I say. My existence as dayglored is public, but I'm not too concerned about that exposure.
Use a Raspberry Pi to surf the web anonymously.
And keep it in your pocket when you leave :-)
Keep your keys only in your head.
Use encryption with plausible deniability features.
The Raspberry model 2 is the size of a credit card and the Pi Zero is about the size of a stick of gum.