A license to encrypt...

I have been urging that Americans shun passwords that make them prey to identity thieves and unwarranted government snooping and I recommended use of passing license plates for random characters that are easily remembered.

Current New Jersey plates are especially suitable, coming in the easy to remember form LLL NNL, where L stands for letter and N for numeral. The number of combinations is high and probability of mechanical decryption low.

My new suggestion is to randomly select from, say a shopping center parking lot, two license plates and combine them thus: LLL NNL LLL. Easy to remember and low chance of decryption.

For example, take DFF 52W XBN and QRC 22N PFC and combine them to make

DFF 52W PFC

To get the most out of the set of combinations and reduce decryption chances, change between 1 and 9 characters. (We could say 0 and 9, except we worry about the natural tendency to be lazy.)

So, changing, say, the fourth and seventh characters, we have

DFF 72W SFC

Easy to remember. Tough to crack.

>>>>>>
PS. Immediately after my previous post at a former URL on this subject, hackers stole my email address prconant@yahoo.com, changing the password and the security question. I mean, how could I forget my pet's name? I was able to find on Gmail a link to "account compromised or taken over" but not so on Yahoo.

I suppose they wanted to mock me. But, my Internet activities have long been under severe controls that aren't worth my bother to deal with all the time. That fact doesn't mean license plate passwords, if widely used, won't throw a big monkey wrench into the surveillance system.