Privacy

The fourth amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects the people from unreasonable search and seizure, but the U.S. government has concluded that its protections do not apply to several digital media, such as email messages and telephone conversations.¹. Consequently, any reliable privacy protections must be implemented by the individual users. Many of the people who use digital media to communicate, however, have only a vague understanding of digital encryption, and even fewer believe that their communication actually requires 'privacy'. This article only briefly addresses the privacy issue, and is designed primarily to offer a general introduction to digital privacy protection, and to describe how to use GnuPG with Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft® Outlook Express^TM, or Microsoft® Outlook^TM to begin producing secure email messages painlessly and efficiently. Of the three configurations, Thunderbird is the easiest and most well-integrated configuration (in my opinion, anyway), and I strongly recommend that anyone who is serious about their online security use Thunderbird (actually, several very good email clients exist, some better than Thunderbird, but Thunderbird is arguably the most user-friendly). Mozilla Thunderbird and GnuPG both operate on Windows^TM and Macintosh systems, so you don't need to run Linux to use them. In spite of the advantages, I recognize that many people are still hesitant to venture beyond the realm of proprietary software systems, so I will do my best to provide instructions that work with Microsoft® email systems².