Critique: Why Don't we encrypt email?

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Shonak Nathwani CS133 Professional Skills Term 2

 Critique

The article “Why Don’t We Encrypt Our Email” was written by Stephen Farrell in January 2009. It was published the same month in the journal, “Practical Security” by the IEEE Educational Activities Department. The purpose of the article is to briefly inform readers about the different functionality in common Multi User Agents and the security related issues that are frequently ignored by users when using them. This critique will address the appropriateness of ideas and structure in the article.

Farrell’s article assumes fairly strong technical competence of the reader in the field of computer security from the beginning of the article. This is showed through the immediate use of terms such as “Mail User Agents” and “Web-based mail client” (Farrell 2009, p.82).

 In assessing the structure of the article, it is instantly surprising upon first look of the article, how seemingly long-winded it is to answer a relatively simple question. And for the most part, it is. There are many concepts that Farrell ploughs through to try and explain to the reader, many of which don’t help in answering the question posed in the title. One example of this would be Farrell’s divergence to explaining the two MUA integrated protocols, S/MIME and OpenPGP, and how these have not been incorporated mainstream MUA program operations.  He doesn’t entirely describe why the protocols “remain unused” (though he partly answers this under the following section), but how “these protocols are deployed” (Farrell 2009, p.83). Having said this, as the article goes on, he begins to input his own opinion, and takes a less technical stance, which helps him evaluate all of his ideas and helps him answer the question of the article.

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Going back to the structure, as well as removing sections of the article that are irrelevant to the topic being discussed, Farrell could also have included a very concise glossary of the technical acronyms. Many of the technologies mentioned are abbreviated (e.g. MUA, MTA, PEM, MIME etc.), and even for a computer science professional new to this particular topic, it could be tiresome to traverse through the entire text to remind themselves of a definition -  so a glossary would have been useful. Additionally, important quotes aren’t highlighted frequently enough (only once, on page 3) and several images could have ...

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