How To Protect Yourself On The Internet Part 2

Email Privacy
In the 90s Internet Service Providers ISPs were forced by the government to stop allowing their customers to use their own or external mail servers to send email. The claim was that they wanted to reduce SPAM, but that was bogus because 99.999% of us never send spam. The proof that SPAM isn’t the reason is that the second thing ISPs were forced to do was to start SAVING ALL EMAIL sent and received by their customers.

So now if the government wanted access to any of your email they had one place to go to get it, instead of trying to track it down. Also this allowed the government to install various computer systems in the ISP, for the purpose of scanning all emails for keywords and notifying officials when an email was flagged.

A good computer consultant will tell you there are 2 ways to keep your emails safe from prying eyes, 1) encrypt them (make them unreadable) before you send them, and/or 2) encrypt the path between you and the recipient. There are many products on the market and a few services that provide a very high quality form of encryption for emails, the most popular being PGP.

I won’t go into all the technical details but basically what happens is that you run the software or use the service to create a public and a private key. Then you give other people your public key to encrypt anything they want to send to you. And the only way to decrypt (make them readable) them is with YOUR private key.

You can also digitally sign your email which is the same process in reverse. The message you send will have a signature of your private key which can be verified by the recipient using your public key. The benefit of the signature is that you will know it came from your friend (or computer consultant) and not someone who stole your public key.

If I confused you with the technical jargon, sorry. The simple explanation is that encryption is like a regular postal envelope (except no one can open it). When you send a message put it in an envelope and you don’t care who delivers it because you have a reasonable expectation that no one but the recipient will open it.

The digital signature is like a real signature. If you received a letter in the mail, and it said it was from your friend you would be very likely to believe it if you saw your friend’s name signed at the bottom.

The method of encrypting all the traffic will be discussed in the section about anonymously browsing the internet.