Some of CIA Director John Brennan’s emails recently appeared on Wikileaks.
He was hacked, like so many others these days, because he chose not to use a system, such as StartMail.com, which keeps secrets secret.
At least 10,000 people are now using StartMail.com, the company said.
“Consumers are beginning to realize that so-called ‘free’ email services are spyware in disguise,” said StartMail CEO Robert Beens.
“These accounts are bait to lure in marks and capture their personal information. Think of the things you share by email, like tax returns, medical issues and the business of daily life. Companies like Yahoo and Gmail scan that information to target advertising – and Edward Snowden revealed how they are forced to provide it to the government.”
WND reported when the concept was explained by Katherine Albrecht, a Harvard-trained privacy expert, who helped launched the StartPage and Ixquick search engines to protect user privacy.
“It would blow people’s minds if they knew how much information the big search engines have on the American public,” she said at the time. “In fact, their dossiers are so detailed they would probably be the envy of the KGB.”
It happens every day, Albrecht said. When an unfamiliar topic crosses people’s minds, they often go straight to Google, Yahoo or Bing and enter key terms into the search engines. Every day, more than a billion searches for information are performed on Google alone.
Read about the shocking exposé of the U.S. government’s surveillance and overreach into cybersecurity, medicine and small business in The Devil Inside the Beltway from the WND Superstore!
“If you get a rash between your toes, you go into Google,” she said. “If you have a miscarriage, you go into Google. If you are having marital difficulties, you look for a counselor on Google. If you lose your job, you look for unemployment benefit information on Google.”
Albrecht said Americans unwittingly share their most private thoughts with search engines, serving up snippets of deeply personal information about their lives, habits, troubles, health concerns, preferences and political leanings.
“We’re essentially telling them our entire life stories – stuff you wouldn’t even tell your mother – because you are in a private room with a computer,” she said. “We tend to think of that as a completely private circumstance. But the reality is that they make a record of every single search you do.”
In an announcement of StartMail.com’s milestone of 10,000 users scheduled for Monday, Beens said the program does not read user email and has built-in protections to prevent abuses.
“No one individual in our company could have reset Mr. Brennan’s password, no matter how convincing the spiel. Our entire service was developed with privacy and security in mind,” he said.
It provides a further level of protection by offering encryption, which scrambles messages so only the intended recipient can actually read it.
“Until now, PGP encryption has been hard to use, so only people with technical skills and patience have bothered to set it up. StartMail puts this powerful privacy tool into everyone’s hands – even beginners,” Beens said.
The announcement said StartPage and Ixquick are the first and only search engines with third-party certification of their privacy promises. They also offer a free proxy service.
The services are based in the Netherlands, where consumer privacy is better protected by law than in the United States, officials said.
Albrecht, whose work on privacy includes the groundbreaking “Spychips” book, called the development of accessible encryption for emails “Big Brother’s biggest nightmare.”
“Emails of millions of people will suddenly be private, out of their view,” she told WND at the time the innovation was introduced. “Here’s the reason why this is important. … Not only do companies read emails, there are these vacuum cleaner programs that sweep up everything.”
from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2015/11/02/milestone-reached-for-service-with-secured-email/
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