Silent Circle, a secure email service that provides customers with an encrypted way of sending messages, announced Thursday that it is shutting down only hours after a company offering a similar product said the same.
Shortly after the owner and operator of Lavabit.com wrote that
his nine-year-old encrypted email service was shutting down in order to avoid becoming
“complicit in crimes against the American people,” Silent
Circle said Thursday they’d be following suit.
“We see the writing the wall, and we have decided that it is
best for us to shut down Silent Mail now,” founder Jon Callas
wrote in a blog post.
Callas helped start Silent Circle in 2011 along with Phil
Zimmermann, the creator of the widely-used email encryption
program Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP.
“We’ve created an architecture that doesn’t share
cryptographic keys with the servers that we control. So if the
government tries to persuade us to hand over something that we
might have on our servers, we can’t give them the keys and we
can’t give them the decrypted messages. We don’t keep logs of the
connections between people. So a court order can’t make us give
them something we don’t have,” Zimmerman told RT earlier this
year.
In Thursday’s statement, Callas wrote, “We have not received
subpoenas, warrants, security letters or anything else by any
government,” but was acting now in order to avoid any federal
interference.
Hours earlier, Lavabit founder Ladar Levison said he was taking
his fight to the United States Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals,
but insisted he was barred from discussing what legal action
prompted the shut-down in the first place.
“I feel you deserve to know what’s going on – the First
Amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in
situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws
that say otherwise,” wrote Levison. “As things currently
stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks,
even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.”
Levison has since stayed mum about the status of the site, but
his announcement came only weeks after National Security Agency
leaker Edward Snowden was reported to be using Lavabit to send
and receive emails.
On Friday, the digital library Cryptome published a criminal
docket filed in the US District Court for the District of
Maryland this past May in which Lavabit was compelled for data on
the user “Joey006.” According to the docket, a search warrant was
executed as of June 10, 2013.
But although both Silent Circle and Lavabit relied on
highly-secure encryption to protect the contents of emails,
representatives from both sites hinted that even that might not
be enough to keep Uncle Sam from snooping.
“This experience has taught me one very important lesson:
without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I
would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private
data to a company with physical ties to the United States,”
Levison said in his statement.
Hours later, Silent Circle’s Callas echoed that warning.
“Silent Mail has thus always been something of a quandary for
us. Email that uses standard Internet protocols cannot have the
same security guarantees that real-time communications has. There
are far too many leaks of information and metadata intrinsically
in the email protocols themselves. Email as we know it with SMTP,
POP3 and IMAP cannot be secure,” he wrote.
Callas added that Silent Circle plans to continue its encrypted
phone and text services, but will be shuttering their email
offerings beginning next Monday.
“We’d considered phasing the service out, continuing service
for existing customers and a variety of other things up until
today. It is always better to be safe than sorry, and with your
safety we decided that the worst decision is always no
decision,” Callas wrote.
Catching up with the website TechCrunch, Silent Circle CEO
Michael Janke said “It goes deeper” than just concerns
that his service isn’t secure enough.
“There are some very high profile people on Silent Circle- and
I mean very targeted people- as well as heads of state, human
rights groups, reporters, special operations units from many
countries. We wanted to be proactive because we knew USG would
come after us due to the sheer amount of people who use us- let
alone the ‘highly targeted high profile people.’ They are
completely secure and clean on Silent Phone, Silent Text and
Silent Eyes, but email is broken because govt can force us to
turn over what we have. So to protect everyone and to drive them
to use the other three peer-to-peer products- we made the
decision to do this before men on [SIC] suits show up. Now- they
are completely shut down- nothing they can get from us or try and
force from us- we literally have nothing anywhere,” he said.
In a blog post Thursday afternoon, attorney Jennifer Granick of
the Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, wrote,
“America invented the Internet, and our Internet companies are
dominant around the world. But the US government, in its rush to
spy on everybody, may end up killing our most productive
industry.”
Silent Circle’s Zimmerman previously told RT that his company saw
“a huge surge in orders” following the NSA surveillance
documents disclosed in June by Edward Snowden. Lavabit said it
was processing around 200,000 emails a day before shutting down
abruptly on Thursday.
Republished from: RT