Silent Mail

» see silentcircle.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Silent Circle came out of a phone call in November 2011, when Mike Janke, a former Navy SEAL, asked Phil Zimmermann whether it was possible to build a private version of Skype. Zimmermann had written PGP in 1991 and spent three years under federal criminal investigation for it. Jon Callas, who had co-founded PGP Corporation with him, came along as chief technology officer. The company launched publicly on 16 October 2012 with a set of apps, and Silent Mail was one of them.

The pitch was ten dollars a month for encrypted calls and encrypted mail on a phone you already owned, sold to anyone with a credit card rather than to governments. That was the unusual part in 2012. Encrypted communications had been a defense-contractor product and a cypherpunk hobby, and Silent Circle put it in an app store with a subscription page.

Then Edward Snowden's documents started publishing in June 2013 and the market changed overnight. Forbes reported corporate customers arriving in volume that July. Two months later the company deleted one of the four products it had launched with.

On 8 August 2013 Ladar Levison closed Lavabit, the mail provider Snowden had used, rather than comply with a government demand he was forbidden to describe. Silent Circle read the notice, held an emergency discussion and shut Silent Mail before the night was out, destroying the server keys and the mailboxes with them. Callas wrote that they had received no subpoena and no warrant from anybody, and that this was precisely why they were acting now.

~ the record ~

~ why email was different ~

The argument in Callas's post was technical and it has held up. Email that speaks standard internet protocols cannot offer the guarantees that real-time communication can, because SMTP was designed in an era with different assumptions and it leaks structurally.

You can encrypt the body of a message perfectly and the envelope still tells anyone holding the server who wrote to whom, when, how often and how large the message was. The provider has to see the sender and the recipient to route it at all. Silent Circle's calls and texts ran peer to peer with keys negotiated on the endpoints and thrown away afterward, so a warrant served on the company would produce almost nothing. A warrant served on the mail server would produce a social graph.

~ the ten hours ~

The mechanics of the shutdown were the message. There was no notice period and no export window, because a notice period is a window in which a court can order you to keep the data. Customers were told their mail was already gone. Prepaid subscribers were refunded.

The reaction split along predictable lines. Privacy people called it the only responsible move available. Customers who had paid for a mailbox that stopped existing without warning were less pleased, and the refunds went out within days.

~ what came after ~

Silent Circle and Lavabit announced the Dark Mail Alliance in October 2013, an attempt to design a mail protocol that would encrypt metadata as well as content. It produced a specification and never produced a product anyone used at scale.

The company itself kept going for a while. It moved to Switzerland, built the Blackphone, discontinued Silent Text in September 2015 and slowly shrank out of the consumer market. The 2013 decision outlived all of that: for about a decade afterward, every argument about whether an email provider can meaningfully promise privacy under a jurisdiction ended up back at these two shutdowns, hours apart, one of them compelled and one of them not.

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