Meet the “Dark Mail Alliance” Planning to Keep the NSA Out of Your Inbox

Slate ^ | OCT. 30 2013 12:01 PM | Ryan Gallagher

[SandwicheGuy]

Email might be on the verge of a radical makeover. And the NSA is not going to like it.

On Wednesday, two American companies with a track record of offering encrypted private communications are set to join forces in an unprecedented bid to counter dragnet Internet spying. Some of the world’s top cryptographers are behind the secure communications provider Silent Circle,

[SandwicheGuy]

Besides, noting is unhackable and I’m sure the NSA has white, gray and black hats lined up to take a stab at this

As was noted earlier by FReeper dayglored, it is a cat and mouse game. Or like a lock, it keeps honest folk out, and most petty thieves will find easier pickings. But you have enough interest, like a rogue government agency, or high value, like some art galleries... Well, the experts come out. Ninety-nine point fourty-four out of a hundred people never have a concern.

[The_Reader_David]

Well then, we’ll just need to see to it that end-to-end public-key encryption for e-mail becomes the de facto standard.

In the meantime, I’m hoping someone makes an improvement on ScareMail, that instead of appending pseudo-English text full of words selected from the DHS keyword list, appends the text, “If you were expecting an encrypted message from me, it is in the first attachment,” to every e-mail, automatically creates a first attachment with at random an encrypted version of a file from a user-specified folder, an encrypted message about the Fourth Amendment, or a file of random bits (with the encryption chosen at random from a selection of different algorithms with a (pseudo-)random key for the first two options), then allows the user to substitute a real encrypted message if he wants.

If I had modern coding skills I’d work on it myself, but I don’t think an app programmed in Fortran, Pascal or LISP would cut it these days.