NSA Whistleblower Used Hushmail to Communicate with Reporter
June 16th, 2010Absolutely no surprises here. At best, Hushmail is useless for communications where a state is the privacy attacker. At worst, it’s a purpose built honeypot.
See this one from 2007: Hushmail: Encrypted Email Provider Turns Over Clear Text Messages to Feds.
Via: Weekly Standard:
To communicate covertly with the Sun reporter, Drake opened up a Hushmail account and she apparently did the same. Hushmail is a web service that, as it advertises itself, “looks and feels just like any other web-mail site, but adds strong encryption to your emails to protect your secrets from prying eyes.”
Yet when the prying eyes are federal investigators, it turns out that Hushmail is not quite so secure. The indictment of Drake makes plain that the feds pierced Hushmail’s encryption either via technological or legal means, noting, among other things, that “defendant DRAKE scanned and emailed Reporter A electronic copies of certain classified and unclassified documents.”
Research Credit: ltcolonelnemo
You need a sneakernet or something to break the digital trail at a very minimum. If its electronic the US gov has had its hands on the tech or ‘owns’ the admin.
I use proxies mainly to avoid being tracked by spammers and ?
Those guys, spammers and ?, are a pretty strange bunch. I don’t believe that any proxy will stop the government from knowing who I am and what I’m reading or looking at.
I would prefer them not to really care about what I do. I feel I’m pretty harmless, but if its that important they can waste their time.
Do people really think that services like Hushmail are anonymous?
Will the real “Harry Tuttle” please stand up!