And in this case, the NSA has global keys to a lot of services designed like front doors. The difference is that the effort required to break open the front doors of every home in the world is unreasonable, whereas the effort to break into every back doored or security-free software solution is reasonable enough for the NSA to do it.
Better option than passwords is keys anyway. Way too many services depend on human memorizable numbers, which we know all too well is a transient thing at best - every year, as computational power rises, the "average" password gets weaker, and nobody uses good passwords.
People just need a personal key to encrypt and decrypt with. They need to protect that key, maybe by password, maybe by printing it out. One good key can easily replace all the horrible password schemes in the world.
But software needs to be written, especially save dialogs, to easily "pick" a key to encrypt with, and when you open files a history of keys used and a browser to open keys to decrypt opened files with.
Of course Windows will never have anything like that, but at least Dolphin and Nautilus can look to adopt those kinds of workflows.
Better option than passwords is keys anyway. Way too many services depend on human memorizable numbers, which we know all too well is a transient thing at best - every year, as computational power rises, the "average" password gets weaker, and nobody uses good passwords.
People just need a personal key to encrypt and decrypt with. They need to protect that key, maybe by password, maybe by printing it out. One good key can easily replace all the horrible password schemes in the world.
But software needs to be written, especially save dialogs, to easily "pick" a key to encrypt with, and when you open files a history of keys used and a browser to open keys to decrypt opened files with.
Of course Windows will never have anything like that, but at least Dolphin and Nautilus can look to adopt those kinds of workflows.