On Nov 7, 2013, at 9:19 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> From: ned+ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > >> In light of the sentiments expressed at the plenary and in perpass in >> regards to opportunistic encryptions, perhaps this is the dogfood we >> should be eating. > > Yes, encrypting publicly available documents will do so much to increase our > privacy. > > Look, I've got nothing against increasing privacy, but encrypting everything > is neither a privacy panacea, nor without costs/hassles. > > E.g. Wikipedia now insists on sending me to HTTPS: versions of _all_ their > pages (I guess to protect against a MITM corrupting the content - since the > content is totally public, I can't figure out what else good they think it > does - although HTTPS doesn't really do that good a job at that). The content of Wikipedia is public, and if the people at [insert favorite government agency] or at your IT department would like to browse it, they are welcome to it. This is not an issue of protecting Wikipedia's privacy. The issue here is protecting what you are looking at. Your IT department might take a dim view of the kinds of articles that you read, and the government agency might think you either a threat or a good target for blackmail if they know the kind of articles that you read.