Slashdot Mirror
GhostMail Closes in September, Leaves Users Searching For Secure Email Alternatives (zdnet.com)
On September 1, "GhostMail will no longer provide secure email services unless you are an enterprise client," reports ZDNet. "According to the company, it is 'simply not worth the risk.'" GhostMail provided a free and anonymous "military encrypted" e-mail service based in Switzerland, and collected "as little metadata" as possible. But this week on its home page, GhostMail told its users "Since we started our project, the world has changed for the worse and we do not want to take the risk of supplying our extremely secure service to the wrong people... In general, we believe strongly in the right to privacy, but we have taken a strategic decision to only supply our platform and services to the enterprise segment."
GhostMail is referring their users to other free services like Protonmail as an alternative, but an anonymous Slashdot reader asks: What options does an average person have for non-NSA-spied-on email? I am sure there are still some Ghostmail competitors out there but I'm wondering if it's better to coax friends and family to use encryption within their given client (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, whatever...) And are there any options for hosting a "private" email service: inviting friends and family to use it and have it kind of hosted locally. Ghostmail-in-a-box or some such?
GhostMail is referring their users to other free services like Protonmail as an alternative, but an anonymous Slashdot reader asks: What options does an average person have for non-NSA-spied-on email? I am sure there are still some Ghostmail competitors out there but I'm wondering if it's better to coax friends and family to use encryption within their given client (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, whatever...) And are there any options for hosting a "private" email service: inviting friends and family to use it and have it kind of hosted locally. Ghostmail-in-a-box or some such?
Those of us old enough to remember when Usenet was a critical online resource will remember when anon.penet.fi provided a helpful, pseudonymous email and NNTP service. It was invaluable for people discussing issues that were not work safe, ranging from dating services to gender identity to cancer fears to AIDS help to thoughts of suicide. Some typical coverage was done by Wired, quoting the Observer newspaper, at:
http://www.wired.com/1996/11/a...
What was amazing about most of the press reports at the time was how they failed to identify the incident that caused Julf Helsingius to shut down anon.penet.fi. The incident is better described at:
http://articles.latimes.com/19...
Simply put, someone kept using anon.penet.fi to post court documents revealing Scientology's inner secrets. The documents are infamous and broadly available online, but 20 years ago they were not so broadly avaialble.
Why do I mention this? Partly because it points out that anonymous, and pseudonymous services, are always at risk from court ordered revelations about their clients. And I mention it partly because it's vital to see press coverage about the events as possibly skewed by fears of retaliation by powerful groups. 20 years ago, man reporters were justifiably _frightened_ of covering Scientology stories. They remembered what had happened to Paulette Cooper, who wrote about them and had bomb threats faked in her name by the cult. Today, press coverage that risks the ire of Fox News or of the Department of Homeland Security or run afoul of the so-called Patriot Act are at similar risks of abusive, extra-judicial censorship with little safe recourse.,
I'm afraid the desire to censor communications is always around. I do look forward to better details about what triggered the closing of GhostMail's free services. I hope it wasn't a similar abuse of authority, but see real reasons to be concerned that it _is_ about Patriot Act or other government enforced tracking of users.
It is not. It takes a little effort though. But if you encrypt email with PGP/GnuPG, use TOR or TAILS for sensitive browsing, don't post your life's story on social media and make sure your PC has reasonable security, then unless you are a priority to be spied on, you will not be.
Sure, they will still know who you did send email to, but that is about it. As far as I remember, the NSA TAO (the "hackers") has capacity for 100-1000 targets, but not much more. The rest is all mass-surveillance and that can be made much, much harder for them. And it should. Mass-surveillance has zero value to make society safer (remember all those spectacular recent failures ?) and a lot of potential to make everybody less safe and to reduce quality-of-life by eroding freedoms.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Indeed. In fact, every person that gives up on privacy makes the TLA's jobs easier and increases their power. So please do not give up. These people are not who you want to rule the world.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
A more recent and closer example is surely Ennetcom. The dutch provider of encrypted messaging. The dutch police raided the owner, admitting that encrypted comms is not illegal, but that the communications were being used by criminals.
The actual charges though, did not reflect the PR. There was no such 'illegal because it could be used by criminals' charge. They did a 'possession of an unlicensed weapon', against the owner and a 'money laundering' charge.
That second charge, the Dutch press expanded on, saying the company was assisting laundering money by selling the phones which could/were resold by criminals to other criminals to launder criminal money. i.e. a nonsensical vague claim. How would selling a phone to another criminal be laundering? You'd receive criminal money as payment!
It was timed shortly after the failure by the FBI to force Apple to backdoor their phones and it was by the drug police, a unit trained by the FBI, so it appeared to be related to lobbying from external back actors.
So be careful what you say.
Only problem is you'll end up "vendor locked" due to no support for standard protocols such as IMAP or POP3. :-(.
Thus, if you ever want to change providers, you'll loose all your emails first.
anything in Canada that anybody in the RCMP and/or CSIS even thinks someone in US law enforcement might like to look at gets fedexed there by 9am the next day.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Thanks for the plug. We definitely recommend that users who are concerned about security use GPG with our servers via the standard IMAP/SMTP protocols. We have very good standards support, and as others have pointed out in this thread - if we ran GPG server-side, you'd be delegating the security to us anyway, because we would see plaintext versions of your communication.
For the best security, you should definitely be running the encryption on equipment under your control (and not 0wned under you... which is your own lookout in that scenario)