This is somewhat unrelated, but I was listening to "Leo Laporte The Tech Guy" on the local talk radio with my dad (who is a big fan, but less into tech than I) and he started describing GPG and PGP to non-tech enthusiasts.
This whole NSA scandal may really push forward the use of encryption of securer communication methods.
Exactly this. Even though we had the company policy and Symantec PGP software installed, the engineers I worked with sill failed to use it regularly. I remember having to logmein to machine in China to try to figure out why they couldn't read our emails. This is why PGP never took off.
Until the tools take 5 min to setup. And encryption/decryption is as easy as clicking a checkbox in your mail client, PGP will never take off. Things like the public key directory have to handled transparently to the user.
It's too bad Mozilla dropped support for Thunderbird. Tight integration with GnuPG could have made mainstream PGP a reality.
This whole NSA scandal may really push forward the use of encryption of securer communication methods.