Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Do you need the world's most secure e-mail?

Is privacy and a secure e-mail on your wish list? How does the "most secure e-mail program" sound to you? Or rather, is that still possible in this post- Snowden era?
I finally received my StartMail beta account a year after I signed up for it and am now among the last of the 50,000 beta testers worldwide to use it for free for 90 days. I am curious: will it live up to its claims?

Short of sending an open invitation to hackers, I am considering testing it in different ways, such as forwarding malicious e-mails to my StartMail account - isn't that what beta testing is meant for anyway?

If privacy is sacred to you, you have probably heard of Lavabit, the Texas- based e-mail provider favored by computer geeks and Edward Snowden, the US National Security Agency leaker. Lavabit voluntarily shut down last August rather than "become complicit in crimes against the American people" by defying orders to hand over the crypto keys to the US authorities.

Lavabit recently lost its contempt of court appeal and founder Ladar Levison is currently busy with his Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for his Dark Mail Initiative, an anti-NSA e-mail protocol with end-to-end encryption that will make it impossible to access anyone's messages. The aim is to clean up and release the source code used to power Lavabit, according to Levison. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. Google new terms clarify all emails are scanned...
  2. Microsoft defends its right to read your email...
  3. Google under fire for data-mining student email messages...
  4. Silent Circle and Geeksphone create privacy-focused Blackphone...
  5. Lavabit's Ladar Levison on Snowden, why he shut down, and how to beat the NSA
  6. Darkmail opens: New email encryption standard aims to keep government agencies out...

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