Who can read your data?
We have all heard about PGP and how it will block all eyes from our e-mail and how important it is to encrypt our disk drives, yadda, yadda yadda….
In fact, this is true, sort of. Rumor has it that while the government can crack a PGP encrypted file, it can take several weeks. We assume that while it is possible for a competitor to do so also, most competitors don’t have the resources and expertise of, san the NSA.
But what about our privacy and what about protecting our proprietary information from business competitors who would like to spy on us? We need to be ever vigilant. If you wish to have a system that is ,more or less, tamper or invasion resistant (nothing is ever 100% secure) do the following. If you only send out important messages and data encrypted, and someone is monitoring your lines, this raises a red flag for them. Encrypt all transmissions, no matter how trivial: Volume and expansiveness is a barrier to effective information gathering in and of itself.
The same goes with stored data: Encrypt all of the work product you can, no matter how trivial: Volume and expansiveness is a barrier to effective information gathering in and of itself.
While encryption can be effective, it is not effective on things that you have not bothered to encrypt.
Information on PGP can be obtained online at http://web.mit.edu/network/pgp.html