Re: Agenda, security, and monitoring

On 04/02/2014 03:00, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
...
> > Again, with either PGP or S/MIME (and X.509) with a self-signed
> > cert or key, authentication is not needed to start using
> > encryption, only a (perhaps implicit) belief on the part of the
> > sender that, if the recipient can advertise a public key, it
> > probably has the private one and that the key-advertiser is not
> > the proverbial entity-in-the-middle.
> Without entities in the middle, encryption is unnecessary.
I'm having difficulty understanding that assertion.Does your
definition of "entity in the middle" include passive wire/fibre taps?

   Brian