PGP/MIME use

[Robert J. Hansen]

On 2/20/12 2:24 PM, Steve wrote:
> Mozilla is founded by Google.

Mozilla receives funds from Google and others.  The "and others" bit is
important.

> Without Google they would be gone.

Without Google Mozilla would have to find other partners.  I'm willing
to bet cash money on the barrelhead they already have other partners
lined up in the event this becomes necessary.

> That is not possible when you use mail encryption.

I doubt that whether you use email encryption is really any concern to
Google.  Invasive, intrusive email scanning exposes them to all manner
of legal risks, from both civil and criminal law.  It's also a public
relations disaster waiting to happen, and could result all manner of
horrific penalties for Google.

Traffic analysis gives them almost as much useful information with much
less risk exposure -- and email encryption doesn't interfere with
traffic analysis.

I'm not a particular fan of Google (or Facebook or what-have-you), but
let's make sure our criticisms of them match up to reality.

> The question is still valid and imo, some pressure from the user 
> community might help to bring Thunderbird to the point where it can
> be downloaded containing enigmail.

You're certainly welcome to.  If you'd like to see Enigmail bundled with
Thunderbird, then please write the Thunderbird developers a
politely-worded email asking them to look into it.  However, talking on
this list (or on the Enigmail user list) about how much you'd like to
see it in Thunderbird is unlikely to achieve anything: the people who
make those decisions are not, as far as I know, on either this list or
Enigmail's list.

> The arguments by Robert seem to be rather minor compared to the huge
> benefit delivery of save communication would bring.

There is virtually nothing OpenPGP can do that S/MIME cannot do.  There
are certainly some implementation differences between the two, but in
terms of broad capabilities they're almost identical.  If you want email
encryption capabilities, they're already there.  If you want OpenPGP
specifically, you'll need to find things OpenPGP can do that S/MIME
can't do, and pitch it to the Thunderbird developers on that score.

> Imagine a world in which Windows and OS X are delivered with
> OpenPGP.

Windows and OS X are delivered with S/MIME already.  If people aren't
using S/MIME (and they overwhelmingly are not!), why should we believe
the presence of an OpenPGP suite would change their behavior?

> Call me idealistic, but I think it's up to the community to make that
> happen.

I'm not trying to dissuade you, but the people you need to convince are
not on this mailing list.  :)