NSA's job just got harder

You can run from NSA surveillance, but you can't hide. One way or another, they will be able to snoop on your personal conversations. But there's one tool that could make it much more difficult for the NSA to spy on you. Meet Dark Mail, your personal black box for email. Like Google's Gmail and other email services with robust security tools, Dark Mail encrypts email content, shielding it from government spies. But Dark Mail takes the extra step of cloaking your email's metadata, which includes the subject line and the 'To' and 'From' fields. That way, spies can't easily identify who's sending emails. But why is that important, I hear you ask? Because even if the NSA can't read the body of your message, knowing who you email can trigger extra government scrutiny. The NSA uses email metadata collected on millions of Americans to select specific people for closer surveillance of emails and phone calls. To appreciate how quickly this can balloon, consider that for every one target, nine of their connections get spied on too. This bulk collection of metadata reminds Dark Mail co-creator Ladar Levison of the guilt-by-association of the 1950's commie-hunting McCarthy era. Even though it has now been made harder for the feds to spy on their subjects, Dark Mail is not entirely NSA-proof. The government can still target a person and follow each email's trail. But to do that, the government would have to trace every stop along an email's path - device, server, and everything in between. Using Dark Mail is like mailing an envelope that, on the outside, is only addressed to and from post offices. Finding the actual sender and recipient is not an unsolvable mystery, but Dark Mail does put the drag in dragnet. Used right, this should make it technologically impossible to conduct mass surveillance.