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Silent Circle Follows Lavabit By Closing Encrypted E-mail Service
Okian Warrior writes "Silent Circle shuttered its encrypted e-mail service on Thursday, in an apparent attempt to avoid government scrutiny that may threaten its customers' privacy. The company announced that it could 'see the writing on the wall' and decided it would be best to shut down its Silent Mail feature. 'We’ve been debating this for weeks, and had changes planned starting next Monday. We’d considered phasing the service out, continuing service for existing customers, and a variety of other things up until today. It is always better to be safe than sorry, and with your safety we decided that the worst decision is always no decision.' The company said it was inspired by the closure earlier Thursday of Lavabit, another encrypted e-mail service provider that alluded to a possible national security investigation."
Does anyone have replacement recommendations for people who used these services?
It turned out that the visit from Homeland Security after the "pressure cooker" and "backpack" searches weren't a result of Google monitoring but of a report from the guy's employer after finding the search on his work computer.
Or, we could all go back to writing letters. Oddly enough, that still has more legal protections behind it than any other form of communication.
Well, except for that whole thing about USPS photographing and storing images of every envelope it processes. They've resorted to actually opening and reading them in the past; I don't think, given the current state of affairs, that they're beyond that now.
https://www.neomailbox.net/
Neomailbox is a good one. Hosted in Switzerland, also provides VPN services.
They have stronger privacy laws than we do, which helps on the non-technical end.
Open WhisperSystems (https://whispersystems.org) doesn't have encrypted e-mail, however they do have Android-based encrypted phone (RedPhone) and text (TextSecure) capabilities. They are working on iPhone releases in the near future of their products. Btw, all of it is open source and they DO release the source code as well.
Encryption should be end-to-end. How can you trust someone else to do it for you?
I was thinking the same thing; Phil Zimmerman had it figured out decades ago. As long as both ends keep the snoops out of their computers, with PGP or GnuPG, all they can read is the envelope information between SMTP relays. As far as we know, anyway...
That method requires a little more technical skill than having some SaaS provider do it, but if you've got secrets to protect, that's a small price to pay. Use big keys and EC to help future-proof.
And for keeping even the envelope info private, just run a private email service of your own (with no external mail gateway), and keep the snoops off of it. Allow access only via VPN or SSH tunnels.
The customers of the company I work for do not like it when their blueprints are publicly available. Would you like to have your code and documentation searched by gmail to show ads? (What information do these ads leak to the company that pays for it?)
And any "alien" Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo or Google cloud data is up for collection by the NSA. Sounds like a good reason to encrypt at least some of your mail.
Using SMTP to transmit that kind of info in the clear is a bad idea, even if the endpoints are credible. Interception is your biggest risk if you are two known parties trading in proprietary information, and probably doing so to/from fixed geographic locations as well. Why not encrypt the payload to guard against this?
What an encrypted email service does is different, they offer a quasi-anonymous way for people to send/receive email so that they can accept messages from unknown parties and trust that the contents will be a secret (if they arrived without being snooped). A person in Snowden's position is attracted to this because he can trade emails with otherwise uninvolved persons (who wouldn't necessarily be subject to scrutiny by the feds or "evil corp X") and the only real "link" between any of those parties is heavily encrypted on the server (and the provider doesnt even hold the keys) unless a snooper gets really lucky and intercepts enough of them to put the pieces together.
This is the reason why the fourth and fifth amendments exist. The fourth/fifth amendments does not exist for the purpose of protecting criminals. The fourth/fith amendments exist to protect innocent citizens from otherwise accidentally incriminating themselves. If it's extremely dangerous (and often incriminating) to speak to the police for a few hours in an interrogation, imagine what the police could do with years worth of email conversation.
This is how it works:
1) The government suspects you of a crime (rightly or wrongly)
2) The government looks up your email history to try to find something with which to convict or embarass you (do you honestly think that if you have years of email conversations that there's not SOMETHING in there that could do this?)
3) The government uses that as leverage against you
Remember, most people "don't have anything to hide", and therefore don't care that much about their privacy. The problem is that most Americans commit 3 felonies a day, and therefore, by definition do have something to hide, even IF they've done nothing wrong intentionally.
If you think it can't happen to you, think again. They searched for years and eventually found something to prosecute him with.
Seriously, watch the first video. 15 minutes now could very well save you from a life of jail, if the police come knocking.
-=Lothsahn=-
It appears that what is happening is that the government is applying pressure to anyone who enables communication in a way where the government cannot detect who is talking to whom. This is a logical extension of the methods that Snowden leaked. He showed that they already have full coverage of the metadata of phone calls, texts, emails, and webpage views routed through the US. The leaks have pressured the US to close the loops. This is a very dangerous threat to our Constitutional rights. Secrecy does not equal guilt, and our founders went to great lengths to enshrine that principle in our Bill of Rights.