If Edward Snowden started a mail service, I'd probably trust it more. If you want to talk about "going to the mat" for people, I think Snowden has made the bigger sacrifice.
Moxie and Whisper Systems probably would get my nod too. Perhaps even DJB or Bruce Schnier.
>Unlike the design of most secure servers, which are ciphertext in and ciphertext out, this is the inverse: plaintext in and plaintext out. The server stores your password for authentication, uses that same password for an encryption key, and promises not to look at either the incoming plaintext, the password itself, or the outgoing plaintext.
>The ciphertext, key, and password are all stored on the server using a mechanism that is solely within the server’s control and which the client has no ability to verify. There is no way to ever prove or disprove whether any encryption was ever happening at all, and whether it was or not makes little difference
Anyways, having good inventions doesn't equal having a secure product.
Yeah but the GP was saying that Ladar Levison must have made a trustworthy system because he's Ladar Levison. However, I was pointing out that there was serious issues with the trustworthiness of the original lavabit.
Snowden is not a security expert nor a cryptographer. He used Cryptocat and Lavabit, for instance - he was (like most people) unable to independently assess the quality of their security guarantees and believed their claims.
he has said that he used pgp in his emails with poitras and greenwald because he knew from personal experience that, properly implemented, nsa was unable to decrypt messages protected with it
Moxie and Whisper Systems probably would get my nod too. Perhaps even DJB or Bruce Schnier.