Lavabit founder: 'If You Knew What I Know About Email, You Might Not Use It'

[MineralMan]

30. No, not necessarily.

There's a lot of encrypted communication, to prevent industrial espionage and other things. I'm not involved in anything like that, but some of my clients are. I only work on the publicly available content they use, so it doesn't really matter, but some of my clients work with all sorts of confidential material, and they encrypt it in-house and it stays that way until the recipient uses a key to unencrypt it. None of that information is interesting on a national security basis, but it gets encrypted because other are interested in it.

We all go to HTTPS websites. We trust them with financial, credit, and medical information. The government isn't interested in that stuff. They have access to it already if they need to look at it.

There, are, however, criminals and others who encrypt specifically to keep government agencies from knowing what's in their communications. Now, that stuff is interesting to those government agencies, and that's what they're looking for, not the ordinary communications of people and businesses.

Most of us never communicate anything that anyone but us are interested in. And that's the actual reality. Most of us are simply not of interest to anybody. Often, we're not even of much interest to people who receive our communications. DU is evidence of that, for sure.