When and Why You Need to Encrypt

PGP, "Pretty Good Privacy" was first created in 1991 by Philip Zimmermann. SInce encryption was considered to be a weapon by the US Federal Government, there was soon legal problems, but today PGP has been widely adopted... by geeks.

When I have a new business project, I want to send all related communications in a format unreadable to people other than the person I am dealing with. Why? Am I thinkingThe Man is watching, Big Brother checking all my emails or even a competitor who might somehow spy? Not at all, but I will explain first a little about email, and then talk about voice, since I was privileged to speak to Phil Zimmermann live on the phone (encrypted, of course) at Asterisk Tag last Monday.

That's easy. Unless you or your company has taken precautions to change this, they're not. At all. For example, we provide mail services to our customers on our own servers, dedicated or shared. Let's take the "best" case, a dedicated server. (The worst case being something like Hotmail, AOL, WIndows Live or even Gmail). Our dedicated server is in a private data center run by a small company who has extensive military-grade security experience. Still, there are at least a few employees who can arbitrarily read, copy, divert or do anything they wish to the email coming and going on this server.

But wait, that's nothing! It's very unlikely that the few peopl, including the employees of our hosting people, me or our subcontractor would even do anything irresponsible with our customers mail. However, any message you send via email could be seen by one or more of dozens of people, hundreds if a large provider handles it and thousands if a hacker compromises Gmail or whatever. Still, this is not what worries me.

I send someone a message that contains say, an order, with names, shipping address, phone numbers, amounts, what is being ordered etc. The person receives the mail and has it in their email client, say Outlook or Thunderbird.

What if the laptop they use is stolen?This is where things get scary to me. As we all send out hundreds of serious messages each year, these collect on many computers. The odds become serious that at least one laptop is stolen, or one desktop PC is compromised. NOW I AM worried!

What Mr. Zimmermann underlines now, in his recommendations on why you want to encrypt your VoIP phone calls is equally true of your emails, even the casual ones. To paraphrase Phil, organized crime members and other hard-core criminals can now easily listen to prosecutors, witnesses and informant calls. With the right tools, they could also listen to district attorneys calling their wives and asking when the kids are going to be picked up.

The idea that organized crime may become interested in your business activities isn't something new. The ease with which they can now intercept messages and phone calls on the Internet is fairly recent. You see, it isn't really the government

I'm not suggesting you need to encrypt everything you do all time. I do suggest though, that you establish as standard practice giving thought to information you put out in the wild. Information about you, your family, your business.

When you are ready to look into how you can protect yourself, here is what you need:

http://www.gnupg.org/