Can You Really Trust Yahoo’s New Encrypted Email Service?

To encrypt, or not to encrypt? There are two schools of thought when it comes to the encryption issue…
Firstly, do you really trust major service provides, like Yahoo and Google, to keep your emails and private information out the NSA’s ‘bulk data collection’ (mass surveillance) program? In the past, they have all complied and done business with the federal government. Previously, 21WIRE reported on how in the past, Microsoft had given ‘back door access’ to the NSA via its_NSAKEY file – which allowed government snoops into just about any system they wanted. There is a ray of hope in the case of Yahoo though. Recently the company’s new information security chief Alex Stamos went head-to-head with the director of the NSA in a heated exchange at a recent Washington DC cyber security event. Still, you can never be sure.
Secondly, is the fact that the NSA are now specifically targeting any encrypted services for their continual digital wire tapping/surveillance program. So will you be better off staying in the general public junk yard of mass communications, and therefore not attracting the evil gaze of the Eye of Mordor?
Ultimately, we will all have to demand that the NSA stay within the law, or at the very least – use methods like what whistleblower Thomas Drake had advocated with project ThinThread.
Until that time, this debate will just be going through the motions, and no real public trust can be achieved…

This post was published at 21st Century Wire on MARCH 17, 2015.

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