The experiment has been done:

A) They took some kids to a party, let the parents see tables full of cake but secretly fed the kids raw tofu beans (or something like that). After dinner they made made the kids jump around to loud music for half an hour. On the way home all the parents swore the kids were hyperactive and it was all down to the sugar.

B) The took some 'problem' kids to a party and showed the parents tables full of raw tofu beans. When the parents left they fed the kids to bursting with chocolate cake, soda, anything with lots of sugar. After that they sat the kids down quietly and read them a bedtime story. The kids were falling asleep in their parent's cars on the way home. The parents put it all down to the tofu and swore to never feed their kids on sugar ever again.

Conclusion: The "sugar" thing is 100% confirmation bias by the parents.

There's a TV program on it somewhere - it's called "The Truth About Food" or something like that (it was one of a series made by the BBC).

Self-signed keys don't protect you against man-in-the-middle attacks. Without authentication there's no way to prevent your ISP (or somebody who controls it) from reading/altering your email as it passes through.

Public key methods only work when there's a web of trust. You have to know the public keys on your keyring are genuine.

All bets are off when the web of trust is being manipulated by the enemy.

I understand those things perfectly, stop telling me I don't, you'll end up looking stupid.

Maybe I don't understand how Outlook works, if so, please enlighten me.

a) Last time I tried to set up outlook for encryption it refused to do anything at all without a certificate (which I assume the Feds have direct access to, especially given the revelations of the last couple of months). Everything else from then onwards was based around that (untrustworthy) certificate.

b) The last few decades of encryption has been dominated by men wearing Raybans in black SUVs. Remember the "export" versions of web browsers? Skipjack? Hushmail's sudden ability to produce plaintext on demand? Why would Outlook be allowed to securely encrypt things against the NSA? Answer: It wouldn't. The boys in SUVs will certainly visit Redmond on a regular basis. I'll bet my life on that.

Nope. Tests have shown that sugar has very little effect on kids.

All the "bouncing off walls" is just anecdote.

This is the real problem with CAs. I think we can be fairly sure the NSA has access to all the major CAs, making 'secure' web sites, etc. moot (as far as the NSA is concerned).

The US government wouldn't have given up trying to ban encryption if they hadn't found ways to listen in.

This seems more likely.

I don't think the "polymorphic overlords" are here yet... unless Obama really is a giant weasel and not just pretending to be one.

But... if somebody has access to your ISP and the CA's servers they can easily mount a man-in-the-middle attack.

Public keys aren't necessary for email. Private keys would work just as well is some sort of key exchange was done in the first few emails you exchange with a person (maybe better than public keys, in fact - and you wouldn't have to pay CAs for their services).

This isn't done in any major email software, I don't believe that's an accident.

You know how to encrypt things in Outlook without first using a certificate from an certificate authority?

If so, we're all ears...

It's pretty clear now why Microsoft never added encryption to Outlook.

(Except via 'certificates', which we can safely assume the government has access to...)

What do you think politics is?

Politicians can use this data to make sure their public image is exactly what the public will respond to. Politicians don't need actual policies any more, just this data.

Once they get voted in, you can bet they're making decisions for you.

$300 million is about what the USA spends per day in Iraq/Afghanistan.

In a week that's over a billion dollars.

Imagine if that money had been spent on something productive instead, like energy research.

The tube can go from side to side across the freeway to straighten those out.

Maybe you could try reading the proposal before handing out Armchair Engineer advice.

He revealed that the government does bad things.

If he goes to jail I hope he gets deluged with fan mail for the duration.

Like the person who taught you to spell?