Being gay is not a crime, and yet people can be blackmailed with it. It is very easy to open yourself up to blackmail by perfectly legitimate activities.
True, there are things that might ruin someone's life even though there's nothing bad about them, but the list of actual crimes and bad things that people do is WAY longer, and being able to prove it is definitely useful...
The same argument can be used to build a police state. But I suspect that you’re not in favour that either.
We shouldn’t be building technical systems that “trap” people, just because they might be doing something bad and might want to prove that one day.
Additionally you’re also ignoring the whole “people have the right, to not have their emails stolen” argument. DKIM signatures are only useful if the emails are stolen, are you trying to suggest that it’s ok to steal emails from people if they’re bad?
> Additionally you’re also ignoring the whole “people have the right, to not have their emails stolen” argument
No, just the opposite, that is an excellent argument and I think that the privacy should be the real focus when we discuss the freedom, and not the accountability. Because freedom is not to be able to get away for the lack of evidence, freedom is not to put innocent people in that kind of situation in the first place.
Police state doesn't come from the ability to track citizens, it comes from the lack of transparency and government's misuse of the information. Now, reality is that having more data collecting increases the chances of misuse, but I think we're attacking the problem from the wrong side. Rather than killing the option to track emails, there should be much more control and transparency on when and how that data can be collected and used.
> Being gay is not a crime, and yet people can be blackmailed with it. It is very easy to open yourself up to blackmail by perfectly legitimate activities.
Option 1: DKIM keys stay private... "That email was just a joke, I'm not really gay"
Option 2: DKIM keys go public... "That email was just someone else's joke, I'm not really gay"
Not really a difference, and with option 2 you can't prove you didn't send it (as far as you can prove someone didn't crack 2048 bit RSA and use that power to concern themselves with your sex life).
Being able to prove a fascist dictator who was killing people for being gay, was secretly engaging in gay acts themselves, might help your cause of protecting gay people.
> Being able to prove a fascist dictator who was killing people for being gay, was secretly engaging in gay acts themselves, might help your cause of protecting gay people.
Because the DKIM keys were not made public, and a message sent from their account could be confirmed to be authentic.
If the keys were public, they could claim forgery. Regardless they could claim their account was hacked, but they couldn't deny the message was sent from their account.
I'm not asking how the technical mechanism proves the messages may be legitimate. I'm asking how you could use that knowledge in the specific situation you outlined to accomplish anything productive.
Being gay is not a crime, and yet people can be blackmailed with it. It is very easy to open yourself up to blackmail by perfectly legitimate activities.