Go ahead, do your worst with encrypted email

Nuclear scientists’ ProtonMail is encrypted — and ad-free

For whoever wishes to author an apoplectic and profane response to the latest newspaper column to offend their own unimpeachably good taste, some exciting news: All subsequent hostilities between you and me can remain private. Finally. You can call me a shill for Marxist, terrorist, neo-conservative or radical-centrist forces, I can call you a fool whose only recourse is to write me on your own time because no nefarious secret society will pay you to do so, and surveillance agencies will be none the wiser.

I got encrypted email last week. It was annoyingly easy. There’s no excuse to have waited so long. And if you really care about the future of our relationship, a relationship that requires no small degree of privacy if we’re to realize our full potential for mutual scorn and vituperation, you’ll get it, too.

The best secure encrypted email service appears to be ProtonMail. The thing was dreamt up at CERN (the European Centre for Nuclear Research) by scientists who seem, bizarrely, not to want to get rich off it. They don’t sell or give access to user data and, in fact, created a system that doesn’t know enough about your data to give much up. Then they based the servers in privacy-conscious Switzerland. It’s not perfect, but it’s very good.

(As proof of how easy it is to protect your email, here’s a handy two-step guide on how to sign up for a ProtonMail account: First, go to ProtonMail.com; then, click on “Sign Up.” There. Assuming you’re capable of selecting a preferred storage capacity and remembering two passwords and a user name, your email is now much safer from surveillance agencies and the occasional creep in their employ who spies on exlovers on company time.)

Of course, “easy” doesn’t quite describe the feelings of panic and loss that ensue when you consider switching email providers. But those of us who once parted with Hotmail can find the strength to move on from Gmail, somehow.

Assuming, that is, ProtonMail is actually better than Gmail. Which it is. ProtonMail is as user-friendly as Gmail. It’s more attractive than Gmail. It’s better at not terrifying you with impossibly clairvoyant advertisements than Gmail, if only because it doesn’t have any advertisements. There’s also the added benefit that, unlike Gmail, it has the ability to keep private communication private.

Two issues. If you’re flooded with email and refuse to delete any of it, ever, at all, the service charges $7 a month for extra storage, which helps cover operational costs. But the real aggravation is that if the recipient of your message doesn’t use the service and you want to make it more secure, you have to take two seconds to encrypt it by communicating a password — secretly, presumably. (Although if you take the trouble, these messages will self-destruct after a certain period of time has elapsed, which, in my estimation, is James Bond enough to justify the whole account.)

This second issue highlights an uncomfortable question: Do people have a responsibility to protect their own privacy when the privacy of others is at stake too?

I don’t think so. Not generally. It’s hardly your civic duty to actively prevent governments from violating the civil rights of entire populations. The thin ranks of encrypted email users suggest that it’s normal to ignore the collective violation of our inboxes.

Still, as long as we depend on communication channels that we know full well to be insecure while rejecting safer alternatives, we can’t extend even the basic courtesy of discretion to each other.

Or, if courtesy isn’t your thing, you and I might do it for the freedom to be rude in private. Were encrypted email the default, spy agencies might focus more effective intelligence-gathering efforts on those people they have good reason to believe are behaving not merely badly, but criminally.