Last year’s revelations about the NSA’s widespread snooping practices sparked plenty of debate over privacy, but also a number of initiatives to up online security. The latest to join the cause is an encrypted email service from researchers at Harvard, MIT and CERN called ProtonMail. Encrypted email services are nothing new, of course, but the people behind ProtonMail believe they’ve successfully gotten around the different shortcomings of services like Lavabit and SilentMail — both of which were forced to shutdown in the aftermath of Snowden’s revelations.
Those who worry that Gmail or the National Security Agency may be rifling through their emails now have a new alternative: ProtonMail, a super-secure email service created by students from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It was the Snowden leaks that got us started,” ProtonMail founder and front-end developer Jason Stockman told The Huffington Post. “A lot of us at the time were working at CERN, the nuclear research facility in Switzerland, and we started hearing about all this and we really freaked out. We ended up posting on Facebook about privacy issues, and it just grew from there.” ProtonMail’s open beta launched on Saturday, and its security measures are intense: end-to-end encryption and user authentication protocols so rigorous even the creators can’t read user emails. “If we can’t read it, we obviously can’t turn it over to any government agencies,” one of ProtonMail’s creators, Andy Yen, explained to BostInnoin an interview.