Levison: Let's Take Your Email Dark

Lavabit founder Ladar Levison, who created the email system that Edward Snowden used and who tried to protect it from the government, closed that system —but he hasn’t given up on providing private email.

The approach Levison is now promoting is based on a simple principle: If your email provider has access to your data, it can be forced to compromise it—so if you want your data to be private, you need to secure it even from the company that’s providing your email service. You need to store your data on that company’s computers, but in encrypted form, with the private key needed to decrypt it only on your own machines. The idea is known as end-to-end encryption: that is, keeping the email encrypted all the way from the computer on which it is written to the computer on which the intended recipient reads it. Then if the National Security Agency or anyone else tries to catch it in between, all the snoops get is a mash of gibberish—unless they devote massive computer power to decrypt it (the digital equivalent of picking the lock) or somehow get the keys.

End-to-end encryption is already possible among people willing to learn some skills and put in the effort. But in order to make it easy for a wide range of users to adopt, Levison and his former competitor Silent Circle are urging email providers such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to build end-to-end encryption into their technology . They’ve named their movement the Dark Mail Alliance .

This would come at a cost. Some email providers, most notably Google, pay for the free email service they give their users by showing ads relevant to their email. You can’t do that if your own computers can’t scan the email to see what’s relevant. But the NSA continues to attack Google and its competitors, and Google has slammed the door on an abusive government before.

Meanwhile, Levison, Silent Circle, and their Dark Mail Alliance are setting a powerful example. They are reminding us all that those who create value can stand up and fight for the values they create.

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