Silent Circle And Lavabit Creating Anti-Snooping Email Alternative

Pro-privacy communications providers Silent Circle and Lavabit, the service used by whistleblower Edward Snowden, have announced they are working together to develop “a private, next-generation, end-to-end encrypted alternative” to email.

They launched the Dark Mail Alliance yesterday, with the aim of bringing “Email 3.0” to the world, fixing the broken email systems of today, which can no longer provide privacy, according to the two companies.

Silent Circle impressing

Both had retired their own email products, over fears that the National Security Agency (NSA) would be able to get at customers’ content if they so wished.

“As founding partners of the Dark Mail Alliance, both Silent Circle and Lavabit will work to bring other members into the alliance, assist them in implementing the new protocol and work jointly to proliferate the world’s first end-to-end encrypted Email 3.0 across email software developers and service providers globally,” an announcement read.

“Our goal is to open source the protocol and architecture and help others implement this new technology to address the privacy concerns over surveillance and back door threats of any kind.”

Those who want a simple, truly secure email system often have to use PGP, which uses public key cryptography to guarantee a high level of security. But it is time consuming to implement and far trickier than using a standard email client like Gmail.

It remains to be seen whether businesses are concerned enough about NSA surveillance to adopt Silent Circle-like technologies en masse. Despite the furore around NSA surveillance, companies have not been overly alarmed, according to Art Coviello, executive chairman of RSA.

In comparison to the huge concern about the breach of RSA’s own systems, when SecurID-related information was stolen, customers have made little fuss about claims the NSA had put backdoors in encryption standards, one of which had been used in RSA products.

“You’d be amazed at how few customers [care],” he told TechWeekEurope, during the RSA 2013 Conference in Amsterdam today.

Coviello has still been impressed by Silent Circle, however, describing it as a “pretty cool company”. “I do like the Silent Circle guys.”

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