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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
ProtonMail suggests fear of the Donald prompting lockdown
"ProtonMail follows the Swiss policy of neutrality. We do not take any position for or against Trump," the Swiss company's CEO stated on Monday, before revealing that new user sign-ups immediately doubled following Trump's election victory.
ProtonMail has published figures showing that as soon as the election results rolled in, the public began to seek out privacy-focused services such as its own.
CEO Andy Yen said that, in communicating with these new users, the company found people apprehensive about the decisions that President Trump might take and what they would mean considering the surveillance activities of the National Security Agency.
"Given Trump's campaign rhetoric against journalists, political enemies, immigrants, and Muslims, there is concern that Trump could use the new tools at his disposal to target certain groups," Yen said. "As the NSA currently operates completely out of the public eye with very little legal oversight, all of this could be done in secret."
ProtonMail was launched back in May 2014 by scientists who had met at CERN and MIT. In response to the Snowden revelations regarding collusion between the NSA and other email providers such as Google, they created a government-resistant, end-to-end encrypted email service.
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/14/protonmail_subs_double_after_trump_victory/
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday November 15 2016, @04:25AM
Yes, because S/MIME is the corporate solution, key escrow and all. And outside a corporate environment nobody has a clue how to make it go. Which is why I suggest autogenerating a keyring on install if one isn't found and publishing the keyring. Automated and default being the key words here, so your Great Aunt Tilley uses it without really knowing she is. And when most people are encrypting all/most traffic your important encrypted message no longer stands out like a turd in a punchbowl. Even better, by adopting an encrypting email client you could even keep a gmail account (via IMAP) and even Google wouldn't know much (they would get subject lines and all the other headers) about what you were doing other than who you were doing it with. Which, as I already noted, traffic analysis gives any dedicated foe without a fair amount of effort and bother (such as random delivery delays).
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Tuesday November 15 2016, @03:27PM
These days the spy agencies are more interested in the meta-data than the actual content of the message. Adding strong encryption and authentication actually makes tracking based on meta-data more reliable. The content of your individual messages is not an interesting to a huge data-mining operation as the structure of your social network graph.
I suspect that is why a lot of the "encrypted e-mail" providers do not support GPG or S/MIME. They want to encrypt the subject lines too. It just so happens that they get to be a data silo. Of course, I am not even sure it is possible to hide who you are talking to (other than things like the bitmessage experiment (works kinds of like a numbers station)).