Welcome the Dark Mail Alliance. The founders of Silent Circle Email and Lavabit, both of which closed their services rather than knuckle under to the NSA, have created an alliance to “bring the world our unique end-to-end encrypted protocol and architecture that is the ‘next-generation’ of private and secure email.” These are the good guys.
Phil Zimmerman of Silent Circle, author of the encryption suite PGP, took on the Federal apparatus in the 90’s to get his software released globally while the US government attempted to declare it a weapon and place arms export controls on it. Happily, Phil won.
Ladar Levison, founder of Edward Snowden’s email service Lavabit, shutdown his entire company rather than hand over his client’s emails to the NSA. Once a court ordered him to hand over encryption keys he did so on printed pages in unscannable 4 point font of 2,560 characters! Awesome!
Now both companies are in talks to create something that’s been available on the web for nearly two decades, but lacking in email: an email protocol that is encrypted and secure from end to end.
5:34 pm on November 1, 2013
