I've been fascinated by the science of encryption for a few years now. It's gone way beyond the old letter substitution of my youth into advanced mathematics, giving codes that could take longer than the age of the universe to crack. There are a multitude of free tools that allow you to protect your communications from anyone who might be listening in. It doesn't have to be the government spooks, your email could be read by anyone with access to a server that it passes through.

The basis of my encryption options is GPG (Gnu Privacy Guard, descended from PGP, Pretty Good Privacy). This uses public key encryption techniques. This means that you can freely publish a key for people to encrypt messages to you with, but only you can read them with your secret key. One of the interesting concepts is that other people can 'sign' your public key to say that they confirm that you are who you say you are. Yesterday Simon and I met up with Rob from Rotterdam to exchange keys. This was coordinated via Biglumber.

There are utilities for most email clients that allow easy use of GPG. My chat client of choice, Psi, can also use it to encrypt instant messages. Simon and I are using that now. I just need to bring some of my other contacts up to speed.

I don't have major secrets, but I like my privacy.

Assorted encryption links on my del.icio.us.