In August, Ladar Levison, the founder of Lavabit — the email service provider allegedly used by Edward Snowden — decided to shut down the entire company rather than comply with a broad surveillance request.
A few hours later, spooked by Levison's extreme move, private communications startup Silent Circle abruptly and preemptively shut down its own email service, too.
See also: Did the FBI Lean On Microsoft for Access to Its Encryption Software?
Now, almost three months later, Lavabit and Silent Circle will announce their plans to join forces and launch Dark Mail, a new secure, encrypted and peer-to-peer email system more resistant to government surveillance. They're calling it the "Dark Mail Alliance."
"It's time to build a new email protocol that is secure by default, because we can't trust the Internet anymore, we can't trust governments anymore ," said Levison in an interview with Mashable. "So we need to build a new system that is resilient to that kind of interference."
Dark Mail will not only be implemented in new Silent Circle secure email apps, but also offered as an open source system based on a new architecture using the XMPP protocol and the secure protocol developed by Silent Circle called SCIMP (Silent Circle Instant Messaging Protocol). Silent Circle and Levison will assist other providers in implementing Dark Mail and using it themselves, as Levison and Silent Circle CEO Mike Janke explained in a phone interview on Tuesday.
Levison, along with Silent Circle cofounders Janke and CTO Jon Callas, will announce Dark Mail at the Inbox Love conference on Wednesday in a "surprise" appearance at the end of Levison's keynote.
The technical details will be published in a white paper in several weeks. The code will be released months before the actual launch, a time frame Janke pegs to the second quarter of 2014. This is also when Silent Circle plans to launch its own Dark Mail apps with the same look and feel of email, Janke said.
Dark Mail aims to to revamp email as we know it, making it more resistant to surveillance. Theoretically, providers will have neither the keys to Dark Mail nor the ability to turn over data to law enforcement, like the FBI or NSA — they will only have scrambled communications.
Today, it's still hard for the average person to use email with PGP , a popular encryption software invented by Silent Circle's founder Phil Zimmermann in the '90s. Even PGP-encrypted email leaks some metadata like the subject, the identities of the sender, receiver and timestamp.
Encryption keys used for securing the email content and metadata on Dark Mail will be created on the device, and messages will be stored encrypted in the cloud until the receiver gets a notification, Janke said. Once the message is downloaded, it will be decrypted on the receiver's device, according to Callas. This way, the provider won't see the unscrambled content of an email and doesn't have the keys to decrypt them.
See also: Why Email Can’t Be Completely Private
Making encryption easy to use for the masses was also the basis of Silent Circle and other popular encryption apps like Cryptocat and Wickr.
But that's easier said than done. There is always a trade-off between usability and security, so it remains to be seen how many users Dark Mail will attract.
Moreover, asking email providers to use a new email system is a seemingly herculean task, even with niche providers like Hushmail or Mega. The bigger hurdle, however, will be convincing email giants like Gmail or Outlook users to jump ship for Dark Mail.
The idea is also plagued by technical challenges. The main one, Janke said, will be to develop a system to sync messages across devices — difficult because the encryption keys will be stored locally on every device. Apple is able to do so with iMessage, but its encryption system isn't designed to thwart the NSA.
Dark Mail will be compatible with traditional email providers, like Silent Phone, Janke said. A Dark Mail user will be able to email Gmail or Yahoo mail users, but the app will alert them that their communication won't be secure and 100% encrypted.
Levison and Janke began working on Dark Mail after they met at the Privacy Identity Innovation Conference in mid-September of this year. At the time, Silent Circle was already working on a new secure email app, but after talking to Levison, Janke and Callas realized the opportunity existed for something far more ambitious than just a new app.
Following the slew of top-secret revelations about the NSA's surveillance, such as the Internet-monitoring program PRISM and efforts to break online encryption, the timing is ideal.
"If we had gone to the world two or three years ago and said, 'Hey, you need to throw out all of these email protocols that you have been relying upon for 40 years and use this new system because it's secure,' they would have laughed at us," Levison said.
Now, nobody is laughing — but it still won't be easy. Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.
Image: Mashable composite; iStockphoto, art12321, Wikimedia Commons.