Too see how much our Government understands the problem, the Minister of Communication asked the "Correios" to build the secure email system, "Correios" is the Brazilian equivalent of USPS.<p>There are dozen more qualified departments to work on this, and the incredible idea is to build an encryption and certification for email text, they never heard of OpenPGP.<p>It looks like he really thinks because it´s email(electronic mail) <i>gasp</i> the postal services should handle this.
Built by the people who can't even keep the president's emails safe with the help of US ad networks. Sure that's going to work.<p>The Brazilian government's reaction to all this has been amazingly incompetent even by Brazilian-government standards.
So after these revelations of government spying, the idea is to trust email to a government? There is a potential user of such a system born every minute, I suppose.
The Norwegian postal service already has an encrypted email service, DigiPost. The selling point is that companies and the government should be able to send you email securely. Good intentions, but I have not tried it yet since it requires putting Java in your browser, and I don't know anyone who has (<a href="https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digipost" rel="nofollow">https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digipost</a> says they have at least 230.000 users, ~5% of the population).
The BR Gov said the brazillian equivalent of USPS can do the job because they delivered letters for 350 yrs and everybody trust then (maybe it's because only them can do it by law).
Maybe that will work for privacy which we can also work with here, but doesn't solve the anonymity problem.<p>This reminds me... Anonymous remailers have been around for quite a while. The idea being, you get your mail through a forwarding service that wraps the package to the final destination (or another anonymous forwarder) so the sender doesn't know where the final destination is actually.<p>I don't know of something similar can be implemented with email because you still need headers to be visible. Unless email too can be wrapped in multiple layers of encryption, headers and all, that each subsequent relay must decrypt before finding the destination.
So, Correios will probaly hire some Brazilian IT to build this service.. okay, it's safe! :)<p>Should be built by National Security Agency instead if you're looking for security, right?
The last place I would trust my private data is ANY government. They would better spend that money on PGP promotion and public education to get some real privacy.
if the Brazilian government is so concerned w/ civil liberties, maybe they should focus their attention on addressing rampant police brutality & overreach rather than geek-pandering gimmicks like this.
I'm getting fed up with these nonsense notions and governments feigning victimhood to route citizen to their honeypot schemes.<p>Brazil is a country that wants sovereignty over its citizens' digital lives, mainly to spy on them: <a href="http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/08/11/actualidad/1376172139_847597.html" rel="nofollow">http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/08/11/act...</a><p>Being spied upon by (wait for it) a <i>spy agency</i> does not change the fact that a government run email service is the last place you want to host your email to keep it away from the government.<p>It’s something that Iran would do (and did).