Founder of Lavabit, Ladar Levison, has revealed that he will be working with former rival companies and newcomers to come up with an open email system dubbed Dark Mail Alliance especially designed to protect ordinary users’ privacy from law enforcement and safeguard users from hacking and insider corruption.
Lavabit was made to shut down after a U.S. court forced the company to turn over its cryptographic keys to federal agents.
Lavabit and Silent Circle have collaborated to form the Alliance, which will be a group of email providers, allowing users to have full control over the privacy of their email so that no third party has an access to their email information, neither they are scanned for ads, nor easily hijacked by an interceptor.
Levison said “We’re taking our inspiration from the Rebel Alliance”.
“We’re the rebels who have decided privacy is too important to compromise on. We’re fighting to bring privacy back to the Internet”, he added.
The toughest job for the Dark Mail Alliance group to carry out their work would be to encourage other email providers – especially the big tech giants Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft – to join them in offering the peer-to-peer, end-to-end encryption open source tool.
Mike Janke, Silent Circle CEO and a former Navy SEAL, said “We believe email is fundamentally broken in its current architecture,” and “This is an opportunity to create a new email service where the keys are created on the device and only the user can decrypt it.”
