Until they become conscious they will never rebel..

Oh dear! they are at it again.

This time the plan is to store "a billion incidents of data exchange a day". Namely, your personal emails, SMS messages, phone call details and so on and make it available to "Local councils, health authorities and hundreds of other public bodies."

Obviously this is done with all the best intentions in the world - stopping terrorism, drugs, crime, paedophiles and all that good stuff, although what role the local health authority will play in any of those is, as yet, unclear.

However, recent history has shown that in reality it's use will likely be wider reaching and more mundane.

Now, this concerns me somewhat and I'd be pretty surprised if it didn't concern everyone, so I'm going to suggest something.

Why not encrypt as many of your communications as possible?

There is nothing illegal in doing this, as far as I can tell. Although, you are of course bound by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 to hand over any encryption keys to the legal authorities if they ask.

The upside of this is that at least it'll prevent random text searching across your data and it may annoy a few council jobsworths along the way. Plus, if they really think you're up to something they can jolly well go and get a summons for your keys (assuming you haven't, *ahem*, misplaced them or something) right?

Another free benefit of this is the verification of your email traffic - by signing and receiving signed messages you can gain some assurance of where they're coming from.

Wouldn't it be ironic (and lovely) if this move by the government actually lead to a widespread adoption of email encryption?

Here's some links to get you started....

encryptedemail.org - has tutorials for getting started in Thunderbird and Gmail

Mac GNU Privacy Guard - Set of mac utilities to deal with encryption and key management.

PGP For Apple Mail - Bundle plugin for Mail.app, I personally use this and it's fine. The latest beta is mostly functional on Leopard.

GPG Eudora - Scripts for Eudora.

EntourageGPG - some Microsoft email thing some people use :)

Oh, and my public key if you want to send encrypted stuff to me :)