14 DAY TRIAL // Lavabit’s Ladar Levison may have closed down the project he’s worked for a decade on, but it doesn’t mean he’s putting a stop to his efforts to bring a secure mail service to the world.
Levison has now launched a Kickstarter campaign for the Dark Mail encrypted mail initiative that he’s currently working on alongside Silent Circle.
The campaign is looking to raise $196,608 (€145,763). The money will be used to perfect and release Lavabit’s source code as a free and open-source software project.
“Along with preserving existing functionality, the team will build in support for the Dark Mail protocol. Dark Mail, a newly developed messaging protocol, is designed to provide end-to-end encryption of both the message itself and the email in transit. Because encryption will be integrated into the protocol itself, it will be invisible to the user. Dark Mail users will get the security of PGP without the cognitive burden; if someone can use email today they will be able to use Dark Mail tomorrow,” the Kickstarter campaign message reads.
As a reminder, Levison shut down Lavabit this summer after being pressured by the government to hand over the email’s encryption keys. He has been fighting the government ever since, trying to declassify various documents regarding the court orders that pushed him to share the SSL keys with the authorities or face daily fines.
Similarly, Silent Circle’s mail service closed down in August as a prevention tactic over similar concerns that the NSA might come after its data. Back then, they said that under the current circumstances, email services can’t really be private and they didn’t want to provide an unsecure tool.
“Email provides no means to secure the headers (routing information, and the envelope). The routing information, which is visible by looking at the headers of any email message, by design, is all unencrypted,” Silent Circle said at the time.