The new ‘Dark Mail Alliance’ project being developed by Lavabit and Silent Circle to thwart online surveillance and “bring privacy back” is on track to become a success – even government, military, and intelligence agencies have shown interest.
“We’ve received a lot of interest from government as
customers,” Philip Zimmermann, president and co-founder of
global encryption firm Silent Circle told RT.
Silent Circle and another encrypted communications firm, Lavabit,
shut down in August - just two months after Edward Snowden blew
the whistle on the NSA and its PRISM program, which collects vast
quantities of metadata on personal emails around the world. Both
companies opted to terminate their operations rather than grant
the intelligence agency access to users’ accounts.
This week, however, the two companies announced they have joined
forces as the first two members of what has been dubbed the
‘Dark Mail Alliance.’ Lavabit founder Ladar
Levison and Silent Circle CEO Mike Janke said they are working on
a new open-source tool that promises to offer end-to-end
encryption capabilities for any email service.
They anticipate the service will be available by the second
quarter of 2014.
RT spoke with Philip Zimmermann, who provided his insight into
the future of encryption technology.
RT:Silent Circle and Lavabit are the first two members
of the 'Dark Mail Alliance'. What exactly do you want to achieve,
and why such a sinister name?
Philip Zimmermann: Actually, I was against the sinister
name. It would be better to pick something a little lighter. What
we are trying to do is restore the privacy that we feel that has
been lost by pervasive surveillance. E-mail is intercepted by
intelligence agencies all around the world. And we’ve discovered
through Snowden’s revelations that our own government is spying
on its own citizens, which turned all Americans into foreigners,
as if we were intelligence targets.
RT:We've heard a lot of outrage from heavyweight
e-mail providers – like Google or Yahoo – over the NSA's spying.
Do you believe they may eventually join your movement [encrypted
e-mail], your initiative?
PZ: We hope that our protocol will be widely accepted. We
think it restores a lot of privacy that we used to enjoy in our
private conversations and that we can bring that to email. But I
don’t think that they are going to immediately embrace this.
There is still a lot of inertia in the old protocols for email.
So, it’ll be a gradual process.
RT:You want to make all email surveillance-proof. Is
that even possible?
PZ: We can’t make everything surveillance-proof, but what
we can do is try to reduce the amount of exposure of email
meta-data – that’s the data that says who it’s [the email] from,
who it's to, the date and time. Many years ago, I developed
encryption software for email, called PGP, and that encrypted the
contents of the email, but it did nothing to protect the mail
headers that say who it’s from and who it’s to. These days, the
metadata and the mail header are really important for being able
to survey a society and see who is talking to who[m].
RT:Have you experienced any sort of obstacles to your
plans from the authorities?
PZ: Well, so far, what we’ve been doing at Silent Circle
is to offer encrypted phone calls and encrypted short text
messages. And we’ve received a lot of interest from government as
customers. For example, the FBI came to our office a few months
ago and I thought they were there to try to put pressure on us,
but instead they were there to ask about pricing. We sell to US
military, we sell to a few intelligence agencies, to the British
military, the Canadian military. So we actually get a lot of
government customers that respect what we do and like what we do.
So it’s a positive relationship for the most part.
RT:Is there any danger that criminals and terrorists could use this service and get their plans past the authorities?
PZ: Yes, there is a danger of that, and it worries me a
great deal. It has always worried me throughout the years I
worked in this field. With PGP 20 years ago, I was worried about
it and bad guys do use it. But I can’t think of a way, and other
cryptographers feel this way too, we don’t know how to make this
technology available to the entire population without it also
being available to criminals and terrorists and all kinds of bad
guys. But think about how they use other technologies. The 9/11
hijackers purchased GPS receivers to guide their airplanes to
their targets. What are we supposed to do about that? Are we
supposed to stop selling GPS receivers because Al-Qaeda might use
it? It’s the same with many technologies.