Silent Circle on secure electronic communications: ‘You may wish to avoid email altogether…’

When American firm Silent Circle shut down its Silent Mail encrypted-email service earlier this month, it claimed that “e-mail as we know it today is fundamentally broken from a privacy perspective”.

Now the company has been elaborating on the claim in response to questions about why it couldn’t just use an asymmetric key cryptography plug-in for email applications to secure communications between its users.

In short, it’s all about the metadata.

“If the goal is simply to encrypt the body of the message there are services and products that accomplish this,” explained Silent Circle’s technical operations manager Louis Kowolowski in a blog post.

“If your goal is to not have metadata leakage in your otherwise secure communications, you may wish to avoid email altogether. Email leaks the information about who is communicating, and how often. This information may be just as damaging as the content of the email.”

Guardian

I think it’s time we evolved email, thinking caps on