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Comment by sown | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if people will start using public-key encryption or something to encrypt mails so that only certain recipients can read them.

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Presumably this wouldn't help because the recipients can always copy out the plaintext of the message to send to TC or whomever. (Unless you're suggesting that TC is intercepting the emails as they travel over the wire, which is quite dubious.)

Do you really think these emails are being intercepted by third parties? Surely the recipients are leaking them and no encryption scheme can prevent that.

the recipients

Or the senders, encryption being equally useless in that case, as well.

True, encryption probably wouldn't help, but you could probably come up with a scheme to watermark the messages. You could make it look like the same thing was sent a large CC list, but be able to determine the source of the leak by a changed word or two. Makes you wonder if some of these smart people are already doing it.

This technique has been used for a while, and it's widely known. It's "easy" to defeat, you need to ask someone else for a copy, and match its contents/changes with the copy from the original leaker.

I don't mean to say it's a bad idea, and it's standard practice in enterprise environments, but it's no silver bullet either.

Plus, to align with parent messages, it won't prevent leaking, it just helps to identify the person.

This email makes the sender look good. The last leaked email made the sender look good. Work out who is leaking them.

No, but their assistants or someone else might be getting to them. Who knows.

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