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Comment by sgjohnson | Hacker News Reader

> I suspect this was a state actor funded operation, for this has effectively, and significantly reduced the usefulness of PGP/GNUPG.

If it was, they did us all a favour, because PGP as means of encrypting emails is a steaming pile of garbage, as it requires both, client support, and the counterparty to have the same OPSEC as you (e.g. not just forwarding the email unencrypted to someone else)

Email was never meant to be encrypted, and the existing implementations (including S/MIME) suck for this exact reason. And the worst thing is that it’s simply not possible to make it work.

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HTML support client side, and required libraries are crazy complex compared to gpg integration. Yet that was done, and never meant to be.

Same for images inline, and the idea of attachments was an add-on. Other examples abound.

While I don't use html in my emails, it's effectively a standard now. So much so, that I have to prod some corporations to fix their stuff.

My point is, the "email was never meant" ship sailed decades ago. Change happens.

And there is no way to encrypt anything, ever, and send it to someone, who can't see it, and then copy it and send to others. A person can take a screen shot, or just take a phone and take a pic of the screen! So even if it's not simple, this problem is a non-solve, because if a human can read it, it can be copied to others.

Which means, I do not believe your criticism on this point is valid.

> PGP as means of encrypting emails is a steaming pile of garbage, as it requires [...] the counterparty to have the same OPSEC as you (e.g. not just forwarding the email unencrypted to someone else)

All encrypted communication protocols have this requirement. And all of them will in the future. By definition, you need the counterparty to be able to decrypt your message, which means you're always vulnerable to them forwarding the unencrypted message to anyone they want.

> which means you're always vulnerable to them forwarding the unencrypted message to anyone they want.

email makes this trivial.

No more trivial than any other method. Once you have the plaintext, you can send copies to whoever you want, by whatever means you want.

The state actors did us a favor by making the most widely used email encryption scheme less useful?

I must assume you are an opponent of privacy

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