Surveillance against Social Change

From illegal to socially accepted:

1. illegal and immoral
2. still illegal, but more and more people start doing it
3. start of decriminalization, grey area
4. fully legal and accepted by society
5. the obvious right thing to do

As exemplified by gay rights or marijuana legalization, at various stages of this process.

Broad government surveillance stifles this process by preventing the change from step 1 to 2 and thus hinders social progress.

Freely paraphrased after Bruce Schneier at Defcon 23. Wisdom is due to Bruce, mistakes are mine.

Better privacy with 2-click social buttons

Today I noticed that the social network buttons on my blog had disappeared - I quickly realized that this was because I had recently reset my theme. Of course, I had to bring those buttons back, but better. By chance, I stumbled over the [cached]socialshareprivacy project (sorry, german only. [cached]project site with downloads) of german news site and publisher heise.

I was intrigued. Not only because this would mean better privacy, but also because of another welcome side effect: Faster page load times! After all, if we only load those buttons and their .js and .css files when we …

Protecting your mails with GnuPG

You probably know that you can encrypt and sign your emails using GnuPG, and there's even a bunch of programs and plugins to make it easier for you. However, if you are like me and use Gmail's browser interface, there's no plugin for you. Your only choice is to copy & paste your mails to some external program, encrypt / decrypt them and paste them back into Gmail. Certainly not very comfortable.

Today, I set out to change this. I wrote a small Chrome extension which interfaces with GnuPG so you can encrypt and decrypt your mails directly from the browser. It …