This is what I often hear when I talk to people about encrypted communication. Generally, the complexity of communicating securely is extremely overrated, and people seem to avoid going through the supposed hassle because they don't exchange sensitive data over the internet.

With this article, I want to arise awareness of secure communication, and in particular of PGP. Generally speaking, in cryptography the strenght of an encryption is directly proportional with the mean time an attacker would need to crack the cipher. This time should be greater than the timeframe in which the information could be valuable for an attacker. In most cases of everyday communication, people correctly assume their information is of no value for an attacker and therefore conclude that no encryption should be used. But there are two arguments against this logic: Firstly, encrypting is easy! With technology like PGP (which still requires one initial configuration), everybody can communicate securely. Second, it's free. Nobody charges you for encryption technology since most of it is developed in a free software context. Third, everybody should protest governmental surveillance and increasing privacy penetration.

PG-What? Pretty good privacy (PGP) is a very proven technology to encrypt

emails. It generally works with asynchronous encryption, making sure only the intended receipient of a message is able to decrypt the message. To enable this, every user of PGP publishes a public key which is used by the sender to encrypt a message. After that, the message can only be decrypted with the private key of the receipient, which is NOT publicly available. For more details, Wikipedia is a good resource.

For further steps, there are good resources for Mac and Mozilla Thunderbird. And of course, my public key can be found here.