Open Sourcers Pitch Secure Email in Dark Age of PRISM

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With the specter of government surveillance hanging over this post-PRISM world, people are beginning to wonder if the idea of secure email is complete nonsense.

Ever since the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents revealing the extent of the spy agency’s monitoring activities, many are convinced that email can never be completely safe from prying eyes, and some have even given it up entirely. In recent weeks, two services that promised to offer completely secure email — Lavabit and Silent Circle — have shutdown, apparently because they couldn’t stop the government from breaking their security.

But the reality is that email is an integral part of both our personal and professional lives — something that most of us can’t give up without alienating friends and family and ditching our day jobs. We have no choice but to find new ways making it safe. “E-mail is going to be with us for a long time,” says Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson, a software developer and member of the Icelandic Pirate Party. “We need to do what we can to make it more secure.”

Einarsson is doing his part with Mailpile, an open source web-based e-mail client that you can run on your own computer or in the cloud. With this creation, he hopes to make it easier for every day users to encrypt their mail — without giving up the sort of search tools they get from a service like Google’s Gmail. The team has already raised over $100,000 dollars on the crowdfunding site Indie GoGo to fund its future development.

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/08/mailpile/