Tamayo said:
In that digital signatures are really astonishingly useful, however, and in that they are still fairly rarely used casually outside the small community of virtuous paranoiacs, do you occasionally wonder if your use of them will attract the attention of unsavoury sorts from three-letter agencies?
Given that our three-lettered friends are taking the dragnet approach anyways, it doesn't really matter if I'm attracting their attention.
And even without the dragnet as it is, I'm very likely to be in one or more of their finer-meshed dragnets, given my interests and acquaintances. I attend the Chaos Computer Congress annually, and I use TOR, so that alone nets me a place on at least two of their "let's keep that guy in mind" lists. Not high up on those very big lists, granted, but still.
And if they see me signing or encrypting as reason to target me specifically (which I doubt, tbh), then it's all the more reason to encrypt. I encrypt everything I can, just on the off-chance that they deem me important enough to spend a few computing years on cracking the encryption of my grocery list
But yes, encrypting nets me a place on their lists, pretty sure of that. And that factoid alone is worth encrypting for, because privacy of communication is one of our greatest goods, and the very fact that attempting to communicate in privacy is enough to get surveyed speaks volumes of our current state.
