There were (are? it's been a while) many PGP users on the various darkweb markets. It was great fun teaching people to use it and actually having a community to use it with.

It was pretty awkward to later emerge as the PGP expert at work. I was at that time a bit shy about explaining how I got so comfortable with it.

▲

serbuvlad 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The fundamental idea of technology such as PGP is that the percentage of stuff worth finding for the authorities needs to be really low. Ie. an incredible amount of "legitimate" innocent traffic needs to be flowing through the technology.

Otherwise, anyone who is using it at all will get court ordered and then, with our current system, you just lose.

Tor solves this by making traffic entirely homogenous such that any "it could be anyone" and by making nodes extraordinarily easy to host (such that any nerd can just leave one running 24/7). Even so there are way too few nodes.

But PGP-over-email is way too metadata leaky, and if you're doing anything that actually has a threat model, you need PGP-over-email to be itself common.

▲

dylan604 16 hours ago | parent [-]

Even today, you still need an external program to your email app to enable encrypted messages with in the email app. With that, the number of encrypted emails will be extremely low relatively. Even looking at Tor, the amount of users is still much lower than the internet in general. To the point, I doubt a very high amount of traffic is "regular" traffic to raise the noise floor.

	▲	1718627440 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Huh, Thunderbird ships with a PGP implementation by default? And it's actually very easy to use.

▲

WolfeReader 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's easy to explain. "I use PGP for my personal notes (symmetric) and for e-mailing my security conscious friends (public-key)". That's sufficient and not awkward.

	▲	__MatrixMan__ 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes but that explanation doesn't help you teach people how to use it in an adversarial context. Then they're just following arbitrary rules set down by privacy nerds for seemingly arbitrary reasons.