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Ask Slashdot: Recommendations For Non-US Based Email Providers?
First time accepted submitter jlnance writes "I don't particularly like the NSA looking over my shoulder. As the scope of its various data gathering programs comes to light, it is apparent to me that the only way to avoid being watched is to use servers based in countries which are unlikely to respond to US requests for information. I realize I am trading surveillance by the NSA for surveillance by the KGB or equivalent, but I'm less troubled by that. I searched briefly for services similar to ymail or gmail which are not hosted in the US. I didn't come up with much. Surely they exist? What are your experiences with this?"
Actual communication security implies point-to-point security. In such a setting, a third-party service doesn't make any sense. Hence either what you're look for can't exist, or you won't know if it's secure.
I am using www.runbox.com myself: it's a service based in Norway, it's pretty cheap considering, they do not have any NSA-ties or the likes. I dunno what else to say about it, really, so I'll just copypaste this from their site:
Email Privacy in Norway
Some countries, especially in Europe, have a constitutional guarantee of secrecy of correspondence, wherein email is equated with letters and therefore protected from all types of screening and surveillance. In electronic communication, this principle protects not only the message contents but also the logs of when and from/to whom messages have been sent.
In Norway, freedom of expression and privacy of correspondence is governed by Article 100 and 102 of the Constitution and the implementation of the European Convention on Human Rights in the Norwegian Human Rights Act, especially Article 8: Right to respect for private and family life.
Additionally, the Personal Data Act as set forth by the Norwegian Data Inspectorate regulates collection, storage, and processing of personal data.
The Data Inspectorate was established January 1, 1980 and was among the first agencies in the world to facilitate the protection of individuals from violation of their right to privacy through processing of their personal data.
Central principles of the Norwegian data privacy regulations are:
Personal data must only be collected by private entities when consent from the user has been obtained.
Personal data must not be used for purposes inconsistent with the initial purpose of collection except with consent from the user.
Personal data must not be stored longer than required by the purpose of collection.
Personal data must be kept confidential unless required by law or court order.
Finally, the coming Data Retention Directive will soon be implemented in Norway but will only regulate electronic infrastructure providers, which Runbox is not.
You'd really rather have the KGB looking over your shoulder rather than NSA? Surely you are joking.
My email server is sitting in my laundry room. I also host some message forums and picture galleries for just my family and friends. It is how I communicate with them.
Only about 1/3 of my family and friends use my server for email.... So any over seas email service is going to have the same limitation as mine. If I email my sister from my server, that email goes to gmail. So now the NSA knows what I sent to my sister.
So unless everyone you communicate with is outside of the US or on a server outside of NSA's reach, it won;t do any good.
Sorry to break it to you, but in the war against terror, the American people have lost.
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"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
What you should be asking is "How do I get everyone to sign and encrypt their emails as a matter of course?"
From all reports, most or all of the countries where spying occurs, despite their very vocal public outcry against what the U.S. is doing, are in fact sharing information with the U.S. government. And even if they don't, the U.S. can simply grab the data on its way out of the country to that server.
The only way to make email secure is to abandon email in favor of a protocol that supports end-to-end encryption, such as iMessage, XMPP, etc. and to tweak your centralized server and/or clients to require that end-to-end encryption be used. And even then, the metadata (who sent mail to whom) is at risk. The only way to prevent metadata from being trackable is to either develop a new system in which locating a user does not require credentials and use Tor to connect to the centralized server (e.g. use wide-area Bonjour to advertise your current IP address) or design a whole new messaging system built in a darknet.
Either way, email is and has always been just as secure as sending a postcard (which is to say, completely insecure), and cannot readily be improved upon significantly in this regard without starting over from scratch.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Many E-mail providers overseas require you to give personal information to sign up, often due to legal requirements in those countries; sometimes they verify that with a credit card number or simply by comparing your address data with government databases. Many countries (including much of Europe) also have data retention requirements and give their own police and intelligence service nearly free reign, and they may well exchange data with the US anyway, so it's not clear you're better off. And some providers of anonymous services may simply be fronts for intelligence agencies. And, of course, if the other parties to your E-mail use a US provider, your data is already available to US intelligence agencies, and your foreign E-mail account will stick out.
As an American, if you want to communicate privately, you have to use encryption, and preferably steganography. Getting an E-mail account in another country really doesn't help very much.
Evidence suggests that scaling quantum computing to the large number of qubits required to decrypt 2kbit RSA would be extraordinarily expensive, if possible at all. The largest quantum computer[1] built so far outside of secret institutions has, I believe, 14 qubits (I may be a little out-of-date, but not by a long way). Scaling has occurred at a fairly constant linear rate of about 1 qubit per annum since the earliest machines were produced. There's no signs of an exponential take-off the way there was with conventional computing hardware, which suggests that the expense of scaling to larger and larger quantum computers doesn't get decrease the way it does with silicon.
Some data points:
1998: 3 qubits
2000: 5 qubits
2001: 7 qubits (largest achieved to date with single atom containing all qubits in different degrees of freedom)
2005: 8 qubits
2006: 12 qubits
2011: 14 qubits
This is the best private industry can do. I'd be surprised if the NSA were doing more than a factor of 10 better. To crack 2048-bit RSA, about 3000 qubits would be required[2], or about 20 times my best guess as the limit of what the NSA could have achieved. Besides, Shor's algorithm is not instant: even if it's faster than any classical algorithm, it's still third-order polynomial on the number of bits in the input, and quantum computers don't perform individual operations particularly quickly, so even if we assume the NSA has managed to make a quantum computer that's a thousand times faster per operation than existing private systems, to factor a 2048-bit RSA key on a 3,000 qubit computer would take about 8.6 billion operations running at about 10-100us each, which is to say approximately 1 to 10 days of time on the (enormously expensive) system (of which they almost certainly only have one, which will therefore have a very long prioritized queue of jobs waiting for it).
And upgrade to 4096 bits, and they'll need a quantum computer with 6,000 qubits, and the job will take somewhere between a week and three months to complete.
[1] I'm excluding so-called quantum annealing computers from this, e.g. various systems produced by D-Wave, because they cannot be used to run Shor's algorithm, so are not a threat to RSA. This is not so much an entry into the debate as to whether or not they should be classified as quantum computers, but a practical decision based on the subject under discussion.
[2] traditionally, this would be 4096 (twice the number of bits in the input), but this arxiv paper claims 1.5 x bits in input or fewer is achievable through a method I don't really understand
1and1.com is a US-based company, or has management staff in the United States, so that won't work.
This is what I understand:
1) The U.S. government can force any company to do anything it wants.
2) The U.S. government can demand that the company keep that secret.
3) The U.S. government can put a U.S. employee in prison if 1 and 2 are not followed.
Seems to me to be a vicious, anti-democratic government.