Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Karl Rove

There's been quite a bit of buzz in the media about Karl Rove. Much of this buzz is political in nature, and not that I have no opinions on that front, but another aspect of this has really struck me.

Much of this discussion involves going through email records and electronic memos. This makes me wonder: does the media know nothing about protecting the security of electronic records? Why weren't all of these emails and all of these memos PGP encrypted? Why weren't they stored on a system like StegFs, or even EFS? Why did they still exist at all? Why hadn't they been wiped in accordance with a document destruction policy?

This isn't just about the news media, though. Anonymous sources should be aware of tools like Invisiblog and anonymous remailers (like mixmaster).

We have phenomenal tools for maintaining the anonymity of sources. Why does nobody use them?