Last week I outsourced my email to Google Apps.

For years, my paranoia has prevented me from moving my mail. I never liked the idea of Google parsing through each message for keywords to generate ads. In fact, I usually don’t even allow Google to cookie me. But now most of my regular email contacts have started using GPG. Enough of my mail is now encrypted that I’m comfortable with Google.

I haven’t decided yet if I prefer the Gmail interface or Thunderbird. In the web interface, I use FireGPG for signing and d/encrypting, which of courses places signatures inline. Since I’m jumping back and forth between that and Thunderbird/Enigmail, in order to maintain some measure of consistency, I’ve told Enigmail to sign inline instead of using PGP/Mime. It is a bit annoying, and will probably frighten the sheeple, but that’s the way it is for now.

So, please encrypt all email. And if you don’t, be aware that Google is reading it.

I’ve generated a new GPG key.

ID: 4DB4D915
Fingerprint: CF63 FAFF 1332 2203 C12A 2B36 EC77 CD3C 4DB4 D915

Grab it from me or a key server.

And remember: please encrypt all email!

TrueCrypt is finally available for OS X! Though my primary OS was Linux up till just last November, I’ve been waiting on this for a while longer. Last year I used a Mac at work, and would frequently want to decrypt TrueCrypt disks that I carry around on my flash drive.

I’m plan to donate to the project when my next paycheck comes in.

Judge rules defendant can’t be forced to divulge PGP passphrase

A federal judge in Vermont has ruled that prosecutors can’t force a criminal defendant accused of having illegal images on his hard drive to divulge his PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) passphrase.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Jerome Niedermeier ruled that a man charged with transporting child pornography on his laptop across the Canadian border has a Fifth Amendment right not to turn over the passphrase to prosecutors. The Fifth Amendment protects the right to avoid self-incrimination.

Niedermeier tossed out a grand jury’s subpoena that directed Sebastien Boucher to provide “any passwords” used with the Alienware laptop. “Compelling Boucher to enter the password forces him to produce evidence that could be used to incriminate him,” the judge wrote in an order dated November 29 that went unnoticed until this week. “Producing the password, as if it were a key to a locked container, forces Boucher to produce the contents of his laptop.”