This week on the Paracast: Philip J. Imbrogno 9/7/08 (Govt Monitoring)
While your basic statements about all emails, phone calls, and such being actively scanned and monitored by government and private entities are based on some truth, they suggest a situation that simply does not exist.
There is not enough computing power to actually scan or monitor all that data. What does happen is random checking and scanning for certain patterns, both in usage and in content. The police can't stop every single car and check them all during a DUI check, but they do pull random cars and do look for patterns and clues...same thing.
As for Skype, how on earth is Skype any more or less secure than any other encrypted traffic using the same algorithms and key size???
I'm a software engineer, work with GIS mapping, satellite tracking, and IP traffic pattern recognition, and use encryption every day - otherwise I would not comment on this at all. I just don't like it when people blurt out half-truths and misleading statements that get others all riled up and paranoid. Yes, we should be careful how we use the Internet and any other communications, but you are more likely to get nabbed, scammed, or otherwise pegged via very analog and simple means any day of the week.
- Sure, you placed that online order via SSL to a seemingly reputable vendor, but some schmuck at the fulfillment warehouse puts actual order details w/ card numbers and names into a folder, which gets tossed in the trash. Goldmine.
- Smart spies, governmental and corporate, frequent restaurants, bars, clubs, fitness joints, and such near their targets and wait for employees or principals to start talking to each other in hopes of picking up juicy information.
- Spyware is one of the most effective means of getting information these days. All this talk of brute force monitoring of packet traffic is very sketchy and won't yield much useful information, but getting once simpleton at ACME Industries to click on something and install your little payload is golden. Now your little program is inside ACME and is forwarding all the schmuck's email back to you. THIS is how it works, more often than not.