I was recently thinking about Digital IDs and secure e-mail and it occurred to me to visit Verisign’s web site to see if they were still selling them. It turns out that they are ($14.95/per year), but it took me several clicks to find out where to get the ID. They have that buried in their site (it’s not even on the main page anymore) because that part of the business failed. No one is acquiring digital IDs for themselves.

Why not? Clearly, sending out e-mail is the equivalent of send a postcard — anyone that wants to read it along the way can do so very easily. How do you know that AOL or Earthlink or your cable provider aren’t reading your mail? They might say they aren’t, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t. Yet no one secures their e-mail today.

Without making a value judgement on this, I wonder if this is really a larger statement about privacy. What doesn’t slap us on the face doesn’t concern us. Sure, we close the window shades at night so no one sees us changing our clothes, but we don’t think about the fact that our cellular telephone conversations can be heard by anyone with the right equipment. Same with e-mail.

Likely, some major incident will occur that will change our perspective on this. People are changing their attitudes about social security numbers now that identity theft is happening. Anti-virus software is becoming pervasive as the problem with viruses reaches epidemic proportions. Perhaps a similar revolution will occur with the right impetus. Maybe when someone creates a web site with all of the e-mail traffic flying through AOL, we’ll think twice about sending cleartext e-mails.

In the mean time, if you have something important to send me, get a PGP key. You can download the free, non-commercial version of PGP for Windows (which integrates with Outlook, Outlook Express, and Eudora), from international PGP web site. My PGP key is located here. You should be able to copy it into your key ring directly. If you want someone to try this out with, send me an encrypted note. Be sure to post your key on one of the keyservers so I can get it.