“If you knew what I know about email, you might not use it either,” said the owner of secure email service Lavabit as he recently shut it down. “There is no way to do encrypted e-mail where the content is protected,” said Phil Zimmermann as he suddenly shut down Silent Circle’s secure email service. The reality is that email is fundamentally insecure and can never be protected from government surveillance in the same way some other communications can.
Sure, you may be using a different encrypted and “secure” email service that hasn’t shut down yet. But they’re vulnerable to the same US government pressure Lavabit faced — that’s why Silent Circle shut down before it was contacted by the government. Some less principled services will opt to cooperate with governments rather than shut down. We don’t know exactly what demands Lavabit faced, as they’re forbidden from disclosing anything they experienced as a result of backdoor orders from the secret US surveillance court that enables PRISM and other NSA surveillance programs.
Now, let’s look at why email is a poor choice for secure communications, and how it’s an easy target for government snooping.
