OK, so Monday I lampooned the Director of the CIA for using AOL email to transmit top secret CIA files (yikes). And of course we all remember the Hillary Rodham Clinton kerfuffle over her use of her own private email service to transmit State Department documents (better). One has to assume that this pretty flagrant violation of what has to be well known government policies by people who probably know better has a reason – plausible deniability. Some communications are probably discussing issues that the sender and recipient do not want on government servers as a matter of the public record.
What I would recommend to them, and you, dear reader, is if you want your emails to be truly secret, try using an email service set up to provide that level of secrecy. These systems all use encryption to accomplish this goal.
One of the best ones is ProtonMail, which was developed at CERN, the European energy authority, after the Snowden revelations about the NSA. These are the same fine people who brought us the Higgs boson and the World Wide Web protocol. This is Switzerland, privacy capitol of the world. ProtonMail works by encrypting the message in the computer’s web browser, and so provides truly end to end encryption. The only way anyone can decode your mail is if you give them the key yourself. ProtonMail does not store the key.
Other encrypted email products do exist. Please check out the links below for more information.
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About the Author:
I am a cybersecurity and IT instructor, cybersecurity analyst, pen-tester, trainer, and speaker. I am an owner of the WyzCo Group Inc. In addition to consulting on security products and services, I also conduct security audits, compliance audits, vulnerability assessments and penetration tests. I also teach Cybersecurity Awareness Training classes. I work as an information technology and cybersecurity instructor for several training and certification organizations. I have worked in corporate, military, government, and workforce development training environments I am a frequent speaker at professional conferences such as the Minnesota Bloggers Conference, Secure360 Security Conference in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, the (ISC)2 World Congress 2016, and the ISSA International Conference 2017, and many local community organizations, including Chambers of Commerce, SCORE, and several school districts. I have been blogging on cybersecurity since 2006 at http://wyzguyscybersecurity.com