The Sons of Liberty could not have caused the American Revolution if they could not communicate privately.

Nowadays, secure communication is more complicated than just locking the doors and whispering. With the advent of the World Wide Web, the way people communicate has fundamentally changed. Now, communication happens not just across the room but also across the world.

I think that people ought to care more about security, but the true reason that most people shrug privacy without a fight is not that they don’t care about it; it’s that tools to secure communication online are not readily accessible to the general, non-technical public.

It’s just too much of a pain to secure your online activity, and it shouldn’t be that way.

If you have doubts on the importance of information security, think again. For one, the protection of free speech depends on it; it is difficult to be a political dissenter in a strong surveillance state like China, for instance.

While that opinion may border too much on paranoia, it’s also a matter of protecting your personal information from fraud and identity theft. Many argue they have nothing to hide, but conveniently forget that they do wish to hide their bank account numbers, and don’t want the local cyber-bully to read their significant others’ love letters.

The problem lies in the mechanisms for facilitating secure communication. On one level, some of the technological approaches to security are flawed because of the assumptions they rest on (that’s another, nerdier discussion), but I think most people fail to adopt security measures because the tools are too plain difficult to use.

For instance, take email. Email on its own is a fundamentally insecure protocol– that is, it’s not confidential, since you could intercept a message as it is in transit; it doesn’t guarantee the sender or receiver are who they claim they are; and you can’t necessarily even be sure that what you receive is what the sender actually sent, since someone can intercept the message and tamper with it.

There are two ways to deal with this conundrum. For one, you could just not use email (yeah, right). But thankfully, there exists the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) program that provides a suite of tools that allow you to effectively secure all of the above issues with email.

“That sounds great, Omar!” you may exclaim, but using it is not trivial. First, you have to know about PGP. That already cuts out over 90% of all people in the United States from even thinking about having effective email security.

And even then, you have to install a PGP implementation on your computer and figure out how to use it with your email client (if that’s even possible– it’s not if you use the Gmail web interface, for instance). You then are confronted with making and publishing public and private keys, something that I only learned about while doing my computer science degree at Stanford.

My question is: why isn’t there just a “secure email” button? It’s not technologically infeasible; in fact, every relevant tool already exists. But neither Windows nor Mac OSX come with the ability to communicate securely preinstalled (the Linux geeks like me can figure it out ourselves), and almost none of the popular email services like Gmail or Yahoo provide this functionality out of the box.

I think that they all really should, and this is just one example of many things to be done to improve computer security. Companies seem to be moving in this direction. The Apple iPhone 5S’s fingerprint sensor may have been thwarted already, but it’s a step in making security as easy a swipe of a finger. I’m hoping that technologies like public-key cryptography will one day put passwords on the chopping block.

Since Edward Snowden revealed the tip of the enormous iceberg of NSA surveillance on both the American people and governments throughout the world, the American public made has little effort to prevent future surveillance. Stanford students and Silicon Valley giants, heed my call: you are the heroes this world needs, and the ones it deserves. Now would be a great time to create the secure infrastructure this world needs for the defense of freedom and privacy everywhere.

Contact Omar Diab at [email protected]