Yen says demand is far higher than expected. ProtonMail just launched globally out of a private beta and is currently working on an Android or iPhone app expected to be ready by the end of the summer. Yen says they will accept bitcoin or even cash payments to allow users to remain anonymous.

The paid accounts will be $5/month and will provide 1GB of storage. “Having privacy is very important from a freedom of speech standpoint.” “One of our motivations was human rights,” says Yen. While Gmail has implemented some encryption, they still have the encrypted message and the key to decrypt the message.

This is different from all other systems, says Yen. “We’ve basically separated the message that’s encrypted apart from the key – all the encryption takes place on your computer instead of our servers, so there’s no way for us to see the original message.”

“By the time the data comes to the server it’s already encrypted, so if someone comes to us and says we’d like to read the emails of this person, all we can say is we have the encrypted data but we’re sorry we don’t have the encryption key and we can’t give you the encryption key.” “We encrypt the data on the browser before it comes to the server,” he explains. Hollie Slade reports on a group of young computer scientists from MIT and CERN who decided that surveillance by the NSA and other government agencies should not be an inevitable fact of life. The Only Email System The NSA Can’t Access Forbes reports on an email system created by a group of young scientists at CERN that offers end-to-end encryption, securing communications from prying eyes.

Proton encrypted email