As this piece in Salon makes clear, even if you accept that widespread encryption would be a good idea on the Internet (I have my doubts) it won’t emerge very quickly because 1) most people don’t recognise the need and 2) the software needed to encrypt and decrypt is still too hard to use. The latter is a particular problem because at the moment the commercial company that owns the original PGP email encryption software, Network Associates, is not continuing development.
Open source developers have stepped in, but there we run into the problem with open source – most open source programmers just don’t ‘get’ useability. They write for each other, not for a wider public, so you end up with products like GNUPG that require you to type in cryptic commands to use it.
