Dogpile on RIM
August 13, 2010 2 Comments
RIM caved to pressure from Saudi Arabia and will be installing servers there that can be monitored by Saudi authorities. Now, India has given RIM until August 31 to make a similar concession or have service suspended. I’m sure RIM will capitulate in order to stay in business. This is an unhappy precedent.
India is apparently also threatening to shut down Google and Skype messaging services unless the Indian government has the ability to intercept and monitor traffic.
Clearly, we need ubiquitous, secure and easy-to-use peer-to-peer cryptography so that governments have no central actors to put pressure on. Maybe the solution is OpenPGP but it needs to be much easier for people to use.
Brian Reiter's Thoughtful Code 
Why isn’t peer-to-peer crypto the norm, just something that can be switched on? It must mainly be the difficulty in exchanging keys or authenticating so keys can be automatically exchanged. Maybe there’s a business opportunity there (something with breakthrough ease of use, not like the current solutions), or maybe a public service (government or non-profit NGO).
Maybe there is an opportunity there. I don’t know what it is. Unfortunately the concept of P2P encryption privacy is antithetical to current cloud service business models which are based around monetizing information about the consumers of any given service. The only service that is anything similar that I can think of is LastPass which provides a cryptographic password service whereby LastPass does not have a way to decrypt it. They have a freemium model to make it workable.
I have a hard time imagining a PGP-enabled GMail or Facebook where the providers had no access to your data.