Former Head of Lavabit Revives Dream of Secure Email
Found on eWEEK on Monday, 11 August 2014
Levison is now building out a new technology platform that aims to provide email security and privacy that won't be violated by anyone.
Levison said that the only way to provide privacy is with end-to-end encryption that is easy to use and automatic. He added that providing secure email in a manner that preserves privacy while still being easy to use is a difficult technical challenge.
"I'm not upset that I got railroaded and had to shut down my business," Levison said. "I'm upset because we need a mil-spec cryptographic mail system for the entire planet, just to be able to talk to friends and family without any fear of government surveillance."
End-to-end could already be much more widespread if the mainstream email clients would implement it out of the box with a simple interface. For years you had to play around to use encrypted connections, but then suddenly big players like Thunderbird decided to autodetect and prefer encrypted connections. A PGP implementation could be simple too and quickly spread around. Of course this does not solve the problem of metadata which gives away a lot of information too.