Very good point. Seeing what is possible with just SJW shaming... what could you accomplish with a real threat? I've thought about this for anyone in any position of power, because it's just so cheap to threaten. I call it a Bill Hicks Moment.

Before the wide adoption of Perfect Forward Secrecy I was pretty much convinced that for all the main mail and service providers on the web, a series of threats would have gone out to those who maintain the SSL servers and/or their corporate overlords... and each would have provided a tiny thumb drive of secret private keys in use for HTTPS/SPOP/SIMAP servers to NSA or who ever wished to have them and was willing to give credible threat. If anyone had even been spooling encrypted traffic to storage unread for months or years, acquiring all those private keys would 'unlock' the whole trove at once.

Many people considered PFS the great thing since public/private key itself. I recognize it as the greatest blessing to human safety.

Very good point. Seeing what is possible with just SJW shaming... what could you accomplish with a real threat? I've thought about this for anyone in any position of power, because it's just so cheap to threaten. I call it a Bill Hicks Moment.

Before the wide adoption of Perfect Forward Secrecy I was pretty much convinced that for all the main mail and service providers on the web, a series of threats would have gone out to those who maintain the SSL servers and/or their corporate overlords... and each would have provided a tiny thumb drive of secret private keys in use for HTTPS/SPOP/SIMAP servers to NSA or who ever wished to have them and was willing to give credible threat. If anyone had even been spooling encrypted traffic to storage for month or years, acquiring all those private keys would 'unlock' the whole trove at once.

Many people considered PFS the great thing since public/private key itself. I recognize it as the greatest blessing to human safety.