Google improves Gmail encryption in attempt to defy NSA surveillance
Google has improved the encryption of its email service, Gmail in a bid to make it more difficult for the National Security Agency (NSA) to gain access its users messages.
The move, announced yesterday in a blog by Nicolas Lidzborski, Gmail's security engineering lead, will aim to heighten the encryption through continued use of HTTPS to ensure more privacy for users across all platforms.
“In addition, every single email message you send or receive, 100 percent of them, is encrypted while moving internally. This ensures that your messages are safe not only when they move between you and Gmail's servers, but also as they move between Google's data centers—something we made a top priority after last summer’s revelations, wrote Lidzborski in reference to Edward Snowden’s leaked documents around PRISM to the Guardian, which highlighted that the NSA had been able to tap into the data centres of Yahoo and Google around the world.
“Our commitment to the security and reliability of your email is absolute, and we’re constantly working on ways to improve,” he later added.
At SXSW, Edward Snowden, interviewed from Russia where he is in exile while evading arrest by the US Government for releasing the NSA documents, called for better encryption in order to improve online security and claimed that the NSA was "setting fire to the future of the internet."