?I think we have struck the right combination of security and ease of use,” co-founder Andy Yen told the Daily Dot. They vowed to create a encrypted email system simple enough for anyone to use. After the Snowden revelations surfaced last year, the team started chatting on Facebook about privacy. ProtonMail was founded by a team of five researchers who met while working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)-the same place that employed Tim Berners-Lee a quarter-century ago, when he first proposed the idea for the World Wide Web. Had ProtonMail, an encrypted email system that launched its public beta test last Friday, been around at the time, Greenwald wouldn’t have had any difficulty encrypting his email-the process would have been as easy as signing up for a Gmail account. Were Snowden less insistent in his belief that Greenwald was the only journalist who could do the NSA story justice, Greenwald would have missed out on the leaks and the story could have turned out much differently. Ultimately, Snowden recruited Greenwald through filmmaker Laura Poitras, who already used PGP-a system that often involves installing three different programs, wrestling with non-intuitive user interfaces, and a lot of frowning at your computer. ?So it was one of those things I had never gotten around to doing.” “The program is complicated, especially for someone who had very little skill in programming and computers, like me,” writes Greenwald. Snowden, using the pseudonym Cincinnatus, emailed Greenwald with an offer to give him a ?huge story” if Greenwald started using an encryption mechanism called Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). In No Place To Hide, journalist Glenn Greenwald’s book about reporting on the trove of classified government documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, Greenwald recounted his first point of contact with the man who would be the singular source for the biggest story of his career. The biggest scoop in recent journalistic history almost didn’t happen because email encryption is really, really complicated.
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