Ladar Levison, founder of the now-shuttered secure email provider Lavabit, has taken to Kickstarter to resurrect the concept of secure email in a new, open source form, and called the project Dark Mail initiative. A not-for-profit organisation called the Dark Mail Alliance, with Lavabit and Silent Circle as founder members, has also been set up to steer the project.
The project’s aim is to “cleanup and release the source code that was used to power Lavabit as a free and open source project with support for dark mail added.” What is dark mail? A “newly developed messaging protocol… designed to provide end-to-end encryption of both the message itself and the email in transit.” So that’s both message content and meta data — in other words, not only what you’re saying but who you’re saying it to.