Now Silent Circle is the second encrypted email service to shut down. There was no pressure from the government. There were no financial problems. In fact they were doing great.
Silent Circle reportedly had revenue increase 400% month-over-month in July after corporate enterprise customers switched to its services in hopes of avoiding surveillance. The company giddily told Forbes it planned to nearly double staff and significantly increase revenue this year in part thanks to the NSA’s practices coming to light. In light of those comments, today’s news about shutting down Silent Mail seems a bit sobering.
Join me across the break to learn more.
Silent Circle is no fly by night operation. Phil Zimmermann is a co-founder and President of the company. He is also the developer of PGP, the pretty good privacy encrypted email system.
So why would a successful company kill a successful product?
It seems they feel they would have to betray the trust of their customers if the government demanded they turn over their records and files. In the words of CEO Michael Janke:
It goes deeper than that. There are some very high profile people on Silent Circle- and I mean very targeted people- as well as heads of state, human rights groups, reporters, special operations units from many countries. We wanted to be proactive because we knew USG would come after us due to the sheer amount of people who use us- let alone the “highly targeted high profile people”. They are completely secure and clean on Silent Phone, Silent Text and Silent Eyes, but email is broken because govt can force us to turn over what we have. So to protect everyone and to drive them to use the other three peer to peer products- we made the decision to do this before men on [SIC] suits show up. Now- they are completely shut down- nothing they can get from us or try and force from us- we literally have nothing anywhere.”
Reading the article there is hope for reform due the loss of revenue and business from the threat of government surveillance efforts.
I guess we created the internet and we can kill it, too.
In other news, Bruce Schneier has joined the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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