Communication is a Two-Way Street … Hopefully not a Dead End
With each passing week we must face the developing realization that the expectation of our digital communication remaining private is no long valid. Sony’s troubles appear to be the tip of the iceberg with this week’s news that Russian hackers accessed unclassified emails from the White House just a year after achieving similar access at the Pentagon.
Seeing this happening at an increasing rate, renowned VC Fred Wilson recently authored this post on his blog about the new reality of email no longer being private in the post-Sony Hack world. The convergence of the hacker culture and the increasing volume and value of the information we communicate digitally has led to the unfortunate fact that we can no longer assume our emails will remain between us and the recipient. In fact, Wilson believes we’ve reached a point where the opposite is true. We should now assume that our emails will assuredly become public and write them accordingly. This goes beyond a pure data dump; you can now search the entirety of the Sony hack emails on Wikileaks.
With leaks happening at such a high rate that one of his commenters even used the term “email leak fatigue,” IT teams are scrambling internally to ramp up their security. The issue, though, is that communication is a two-way street. Regardless of how much you beef up your own security, you are still at the mercy of the other side. Fred Wilson didn’t have his email hacked, Sony did. And the recently released Kate Upton photos in the iCloud hack weren’t taken from her phone but rather from that of her boyfriend.
We must remember that the precautions we take on our side are simply not enough anymore. Our digital messages are traveling back and forth creating access points on both the senders’ and receivers’ side. And The Cloud is up there storing and replicating communications which creates even more opportunities for hackers to insert themselves.
This leaves only a few options. The first is the approach Wilson says he has adopted — assuming your digital communication (email, IM, chat, DM, etc.) is going to be exposed. Option two is the telephone but our hyper-scheduled, on-the-go lifestyles make it inconvenient. Option three is a move towards ephemeral messaging which leaves no copies behind. Clearly we’re advocating the third approach but regardless of which one you pick, keep in mind that it’s not simply about you and your privacy precautions. It takes two to tango and if the other side of your communication isn’t up to snuff, you must confront the reality that these messages, whether they be photos, texts or emails, might be fair game for hacker and Wikileaks fodder.
