On thing that always wonders me. Assuming NSA or whatever spying agency is sniffing mail in the Internet, I'm pretty sure that once you use PGP, you are basically a strong suspect for them. Obviously the situation would be different if mail was encrypted by default, but now such people just stand out. Not sure if this is a situation I want to be in...
are you playing devils advocate? this is exactly why it's a good idea to use this stuff even for your normal everyday traffic, so that the ones that really need to use it don't stand out. same goes for pretty much every form of encryption.
your point is well taken, but it's not what we're discussing here. lots of people have written lots of essays about this :)
they have openly said that people who use encryption are of interest to them, or at least their communications are. however this is easily solved if there is wide enough adoption. If I encrypt the shopping list that I send to my other half, or I encrypt the text messages i send siblings or any text communication to anyone, and there are 100's of 1000's who do the same it becomes impossible to store/monitor and decrypt all that information. it would essentially overwhelm them with data, which even if they managed to decrypt (through the theft of private keys or a serious brute force attack) would be of no value other than to prove the task a waste of time.
