“…Perhaps you think your email is legitimate enough that encryption is unwarranted. If you really are a law-abiding citizen with nothing to hide, then why don’t you always send your paper mail on postcards? Why not submit to drug testing on demand? Why require a warrant for police searches of your house? Are you trying to hide something? If you hide your mail inside envelopes, does that mean you must be a subversive or a drug dealer, or maybe a paranoid nut?…”
-Philip Zimmerman, Creater of PGP
Of course it doesn’t, it simply means you value your privacy.
PGP, or more specifically OpenPGP is a great, and more importantly FREE method of securing your data and your e-mails. You don’t want “The Man” reading your e-mails, and neither do I.
There are many PGP and OpenPGP programs out there, but the one that is the most versatile that I have seen is called GnuPG. It comes in some form for every operating system. It comes standard with Ubuntu Linux, and there are versions for Windows and MAC.
If you are a fan of Mozilla Firefox, and Thunderbird like I am, then you will be happy to know that there are GnuPG plugins for both of them. Enigmail for Thunderbird, and FireGPG for Firefox. Of course you have to have GnuPG installed for the plugins to work.
If you have any doubts on the strength of the encryption, it uses PKI and the encryption keys can go up to 4096 bits, which is so strong that if you take all of the computing power on the planet it would still take something ridiculous like 10 billion years to crack (Give or take). I also found a quaint little article here about how the FBI has problems cracking PGP.
“So ya ya ya, yackity smackity… where do I download this fantastic software?”
I thought you would never ask. You can download it from the following sites:
Enjoy!
Originally Posted on Bauer-Power by El Di Pablo
Posted in 
Tags: 
Yes from Hungary!! Stick it to that man dont let em read ur emails and claim patriot act like usa!
I’m kinda torn about email encryption, on the one hand, it’s nice when I am sending sensitive information, on the other it’s kind of a pain when I’m just sending a quick comment.
I would say I use GPG for maybe like 10% of the email I send, which is about 70% of the email I SHOULD encrypt lol.
We are actually looking for a product to roll out right now to our sales force to do just this. But it needs to be ultra-easy and idiot-proof.
I am still looking!
There’s nothing easy enough for sales people to use. :)
I would like to have a self distruct feature built in so the nsa and others can’t decrypt anything, also users cant forward anything if I don’t want them to.
V Star Bike…
[...]Open Source E-Mail Encryption | Ask The Admin[...]…