Personally I think it's about making it easier for things to be encrypted. For example, when you save a document, perhaps the text editors should just automatically encrypt the file based on a password the user setup when they first installed the program.
Right now things like PGP are difficult for even "experienced" users to setup and maintain, let alone the average joe. Setting up encrypted volumes, or directories, etc... it just goes over most people's heads and/or their willingness/amount of effort, so they just don't do it.
I think switching from "you should consider encrypting things" to an "everything is encrypted by default" society, propelled forwards by software that makes it easy, automatic, and default... that's when we will make progress.
Although for most people the risk of forgetting a password and that way losing their documents forever is so many magnitudes higher than the NSA reading those mostly harmless documents.
I think also for that reason it is that our front doors are easy to open by a locksmith without the need of destroying them completely.
And in this case, the NSA has global keys to a lot of services designed like front doors. The difference is that the effort required to break open the front doors of every home in the world is unreasonable, whereas the effort to break into every back doored or security-free software solution is reasonable enough for the NSA to do it.
Better option than passwords is keys anyway. Way too many services depend on human memorizable numbers, which we know all too well is a transient thing at best - every year, as computational power rises, the "average" password gets weaker, and nobody uses good passwords.
People just need a personal key to encrypt and decrypt with. They need to protect that key, maybe by password, maybe by printing it out. One good key can easily replace all the horrible password schemes in the world.
But software needs to be written, especially save dialogs, to easily "pick" a key to encrypt with, and when you open files a history of keys used and a browser to open keys to decrypt opened files with.
Of course Windows will never have anything like that, but at least Dolphin and Nautilus can look to adopt those kinds of workflows.
Agreed. An impressive piece of transparent encryption technology is Apple's Filevault system, which on-the-fly encrypts and decrypts your files when you save them and open them. Users don't need to know it exists at all, it just works.
It seems to me that encryption can be great in some ways, but too much could lead to a very closed system. Something that I view as the opposite of progress.
Right now things like PGP are difficult for even "experienced" users to setup and maintain, let alone the average joe. Setting up encrypted volumes, or directories, etc... it just goes over most people's heads and/or their willingness/amount of effort, so they just don't do it.
I think switching from "you should consider encrypting things" to an "everything is encrypted by default" society, propelled forwards by software that makes it easy, automatic, and default... that's when we will make progress.