Then one year ago, Edward Snowden began giving a crash course in National Security Agency surveillance, which had the policy and, for the first time in history, the technology to collect everything first and index it later.Īfter a few weeks of Snowden’s revelations, CNET’s Declan McCullagh made a simple observation: Gmail supported TLS, but other major email services did not, meaning that a huge chunk of the world’s email could be inspected by the NSA and its ilk, because for TLS to work, both sides of an email conversation have to support it. Those who knew this would commonly comfort themselves with the lost-in-the-crowd theory of security: With some 183 billion messages a day sent back and forth, who would possibly have the time to look for one in particular? But even as mail services secured people’s log-ins, they did not take the extra step of scrambling their messages while in transit. The move to the use of TLS could have happened more than five years ago: A 1.0 version of the TLS specification emerged only four years after Schneier’s essay, and the current 1.2 version dates to 2008. Read more: 4 Ways Your Email Provider Can Encrypt Your Messages Finally, Google and other providers are starting to turn on TLS for the public. Email is getting safer for you - provided that your mail service and your correspondent’s both use a standard called “TLS,” short for Transport Layer Security. That unfortunate fact is finally fracturing. From its start in 1971, Internet-based email has not been known for its high security. As security researcher Bruce Schneier wrote in a 1995 essay for Macworld on the privacy perils of email: “It’s like a postcard that anyone can read along the way.”
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