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To: Finalapproach29er
This fool should shut his mouth, or have it shut for him.

Nah. This article is mostly just speculation. If the NSA is reading the PGP messages from al Qaeda laptops, it's most likely that it is because they have the 'secret key', and it is protected with a weak password rather than a brute force attack. People are generally pretty stupid when it comes to passwords, which is one reason that PGP always says "pass phrase" in its documentation. MY pgp pasphrase is more than 40 characters, but few people go to such lengths because they simply don't understand the concept of the "weakest link". If the NSA has posession of the encrypted message (cyphertext), the public key, and the private key, it should be obvious that they'll attack the private key because it is the "master" that enables them to decrypt messages at will.

It used to be that the NSA had the best crypto folks on the planet, and while this might still be true to a degree, there are a heck of a lot more high-quality cryptographers out there in the world at large than there used to be.

I'd still bet that absent physical posession of the secret keys, PGP is probably still opaque to the NSA. That's one reason why it is so important to safeguard your keys.

Even without the ability to decrypt messages, traffic analysis is a useful tool in building information about networks of people. Knowing that Alice, Bob, and Chuck are communicating with a bunch of encrypted messages acn tell you a lot about relationships.

I support the universal use of encrypted mail. Unfortunately, most people can't be bothered. They'd rather send their messages on postcards than protect them with an envelope.

46 posted on 08/05/2004 6:49:15 PM PDT by zeugma (The Great Experiment is over and the Constitution is dead.)
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To: zeugma

The more basic question: Why announce it and let them know we can read their mail?

I don't understand the need to tip off the enemy when we succeed at gathering info.


48 posted on 08/05/2004 7:10:48 PM PDT by Finalapproach29er ( Election day: FOUR Supreme Court Justices! Enough said.)
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