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Google To Support Native Email Encryption

Google is set to support full native PGP encryption of emails so they can make it through all internet hubs without being snooped through. They’re in the final stages of paying bounties to hackers to try and crack their system before rolling it out to everyone as a chrome extension.

I still think there’s a 80% chance that this system either never launches, or gets swapped out for something more “backdoor-ready” before widespread adoption. In other words, I fully expect this project to be quietly disappeared, just like Lavabit and Silent Circle.

Author Description

Louie Helm is a Machine Learning Engineer

8 Responses to “Google To Support Native Email Encryption”

  1. June 10

    Steven Grimm

    They won’t be the first game in town: https://www.mailvelope.com/

  2. June 10

    Ryan Falor

    Why so pessimistic?

  3. June 10

    Louie Helm

    The NSA and US government have successfully destroyed several other systems like this. This is an uncontroversial fact. I think it’s obvious that Google will be served a secret order to shut this down or they will be forced to add a hidden backdoor. The possibility that they will not cave seems small.

  5. June 10

    Ryan Falor

    I think we would not have preannounced this without knowing very well what the situation will be.

  6. June 10

    Hans Cagampan

    Good luck!

  8. June 11

    tino

    This is much harder to exert political pressure on, compared to lavabit et al:

    PGP ensures every user has their OWN keys, and by making it a chrome extension it means that google themselves don’t have access to the keys.

    From gmail’s perspective, users are simply sending weird, scrambled messages to one another; if you strip the PGP headers it’s almost plausibly deniable that you’re sending encrypted data whatsoever.

    This is essentially the loophole that torrent sites have been using for the last decade — “we’re not doing anything wrong, it’s our users who might be up to nefarious things; we’d love to help, but unfortunately we can’t. sorry!”