Alternative Email Services Can Help You Avoid PRISM

The NSA’s PRISM program almost guarantees that any major email client can be accessed by the U.S government. So how do you get around this and use a more private service? According to PRISM-Break there are a handful of services you can use that allow you to do this.

MyKolab is an email service hosted in Switzerland. As we already discussed before in our story on Swiss Cloud Storage, Switzerland benefits from very strong privacy laws which mean if you were to use MyKolab your emails would be protected, though metadata sent with the email may not be as this can be seen when the message is being sent unless it is sent encrypted.

Riseup is another alternative pointed out by PRISM-Break and this service does have servers located in the USA but they claim to offer secure and private email accounts plus they offer an invitation only service to keep it secure.

Bitmessage is another suggestion and this sends out encrypted decentralised messages via email. This service is still in beta but looks promising as it has few centralised storage elements and encryption means emails cannot be easily hacked or the metadata collected.

That said even if you did use these email service the NSA will probably find some way to gain access to such information but if everyone did it on a large scale it would certainly cause them problems and make it a lot more difficult to watch everyone.

Image courtesy of the People’s Cube