On Secure Email

Honestly, I don’t care who snoops through my private emails. I just ask that they snoop like professionals, secretly, in a way I can ignore. I mean, I have principles, and if some amateur leaves dirty thumbprints all over my mail, or tears open the letters instead of steaming away the glue, like an experienced snoop, then I’d have to act on my principles. That’s an uncomfortable outcome for all parties involved. And moral outrage has a way of burning on in me well through the night, leaving me jittery in the morning and dry-eyed and vengeful. I’d rather rest; so would my principles, and, besides, the bulk of my emails just won’t excite anyone.

And so I use Gmail.

And the snoops—algorithms, app developers, the NSA, I don’t know them all—though, like roaches, I have faith in their presence, they have so far done their prying professionally, kept out of the light, and not left any tatters of envelopes, so to speak, where I can find them.

So if Gmail suits me and my principles have no trouble sleeping all day long, then why this post?

            Valid question. I’ll answer it with another. Do you have a husband, a wife, or a therapist, or a dog? Do you have in your life, I mean, someone you trust so completely, even unconsciously, that you have already told them absolutely everything about you? They have seen your psyche, and probably your body, naked; your conscience lies scraped clean and overturned between you. Nothing burdens you, doubts no longer accrete in you: it all flows freely. And do you nevertheless, from these eyes which will never judge you, these benevolent, listening eyes, do you still at times hide a thought, or the fullness of a motivation, or the real nature of a preference? I’m not asking why, I don’t care; but have you?

            Google’s own lawyers once argued we shouldn’t expect privacy when we use their services and the company even gives our (anonymized) emails to app developers, raising concerns about possible leaks. As for the NSA, they need only link us—by three hops—to any person of interest, anyone on their secret lists, to have the legal right to steam open our letters; and they make their case in a parallel shadow court.

            Gmail works fine for most emails I send on a given day, and will probably work for you as well, you average citizen, who doesn’t traffic in state secrets or the ingredients for truck bombs or jihadist ideologies. I have no complaints, none, as a Gmail user, though on occasion I do get a sort of itch in my conscience. I mostly know what the stakes are and I’ve agreed to them, and I treat that moral itch by jogging, or reading.

But Gmail fails completely when it comes to those rare, very private things, never needing justification, the full truth of which we mean to grant to one pair of eyes only. I wonder if anyone still believes that a normal citizen should not and cannot have any secrets. That supercilious belief, which frowns in Puritan judgement, I don’t call stupid, only shallow and cowardly, and hypocritical, and craven to authority, and stupid. Secrets don’t equate with crimes, not in our country; they populate a rich interior and, like scarecrows, though they might frighten the foolish and the naïve, they really serve to prevent flocks of minted opinions from settling, in one long black erasure, across our inner fields.

Enough moralizing. Let’s proceed to the meat of this post: private, encrypted email. You may use the one I suggest here for everything, or you may use it for one or two things, or you may never use it at all. I only recommend that, for those secrets you would not reveal to your partner or even your dog, you at least acquaint yourself with it, as an option.

Bitmessage is my protocol of choice for sending emails which the NSA and other snoops cannot open, should they hold it all day long in clouds of steam, or, abandoning all professionalism, tear them with brute force. It’s simple to use and I invite you to visit their wiki. But to describe it here neatly:

            Bitmessage sends an email to another person, or multiple people, whomever you’ve designated, secretly, in an impenetrable envelope. Your identity, either as sender or receiver, cannot be spoofed. And your message does not transit through a third-party but goes straight to the addressee(s), thus dodging the NSA’s slimy “third-party doctrine,” which steals from most of our digital communications the protection of the 4^th Amendment.

            Let's have a look at its history, briefly.
            Jonathan Warren created Bitmessage in 2012, basing its design on the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Like Bitcoin it is decentralized, uncontrolled; in other words, your emails don't reside in some server room somewhere.
            Use of the secured program skyrocketed in 2013, following revelations about the NSA's surveillance of Americans.

           And to sum up:
          PROs:
          -pretty darn secure
          -decentralized. No hacker will uncover a trove of secret emails; there are no such troves.
          -free
          -offers the satisfaction of thwarting the NSA. (AKA, spite.)
          CONs:
          -both sender and receiver need the program
          -because of its secrecy, it's used for communication in ransomware attacks
          -Average Person might find it more cumbersome than Gmail, initially.

           Look. I don’t know if you’ll use it; perhaps you’re the puritanical, conformist sort who pretends to have no secrets, not being a criminal—or, far worse, perhaps you really have none. Fine, just be aware of Bitmessage as an option; that’s all I’m saying.

And I suspect, within days of reading this post, you Puritans will discover some secret on your lips suddenly trembling there, and you’ll clamp your jaw against it; against this thought you will never tell your husband or your wife, or your therapist, or heaven forbid, your dog. No, it’s for nobody’s eyes, or for a very select pair. That’s my promise or my curse, and when it happens—remember Bitmessage.