[ih] question re. early adoption of email

[Adrian Chadd]

On 30 April 2016 at 09:04, John Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:
>>IMO, it's the latest cretinous-lemming craze in the world of high tech - we
>>_MUST_ hide all our bits in encryption, because otherwise some dastardly,
>>evil government agency will peer at them ... or something like that.
>>
>>Let's all just conveniently ignore the fact that if said government
>>agency/ies _really_ wanted to know what someone was doing online, ...
>
> There's a difference between a targeted attack on one person and
> trawling through data.  Nobody thinks that link encryption will stop a
> determined state actor, but it's fairly effective against large scale
> casual snooping.

And FYI - for at least 15 years various ISPs have been buying off the
shelf boxes to do /exactly that/.

Some even wrap it up as "market research". (eg, what youtube/netflix
streams are people watching? That's apparently valuable information.)


-adrian