How Snowden's Email Provider Plans To Build An NSA-Proof Communications Tool

Conor Friedersdorf | The Atlantic | November 5, 2013

Ladar Levison intends to offer a product with world-class cryptography and a user interface simple enough for a grandmother to master.

Just a few months ago, Ladar Levison became famous when it was revealed that the secure email service he ran was patronized by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. He shut down that company soon afterward because otherwise, the government would've forced him to betray the privacy of his clients without their knowing.  

Now he's back, and he has a plan to thwart the surveillance state.

Come 2014, he wants everyone in America to have access to secure, NSA-proof email. Toward that end, he has teamed up with Silent Circle, another recently shuttered email service, "to offer an open-source tool that could make peer-to-peer, end-to-end encryption an easy add-on for any email service," Kashmir Hill explains. They urged industry insiders to support their efforts last week at the InBox Love conference, where more technical detail was offered than I could possibly relate...