Would you rather live in ignorance or be more aware of the world’s dangers?
Personally, I would rather be aware. Awareness of the possible dangers allows me to take mitigating steps to reduce or address the risk to myself or my business. A primary example of choosing knowledge over blissful ignorance is the Snowden leaks.
Edward Snowden, the former CIA employee and NSA contractor, amassed approximately 200,000 classified documents regarding various surveillance programs involving the NSA and other government agencies. The programs appear to be focused on gathering and analyzing metadata information from phone calls and electronic messages across a broad spectrum of individuals. One of the largest programs exposed by the Snowden leaks was the PRISM program.
PRISM is a surveillance program focused on data mining electronic communications. According to the documents, data mining was only supposed to be performed on non-citizens who posed a threat to the United States, but the broadness of the collection ensured that some actual citizens and innocents were caught up in the collections. Supposedly, this kind of information has helped to thwart terrorist attacks, although the evidence to prove this has not emerged.
Benefits from the Snowden Leaks
Thanks to the Snowden leaks, a major flaw in secure messaging has been exposed. With this knowledge, companies can take action to protect their electronic communication so that messages cannot be read by the government- or anyone else for that matter.
A necessary first step in this process is encrypting emails. For companies that are running Google Apps, this means implementing Google Message Encryption.
Google Message Encryption
Google Message Encryption is a service that encrypts electronic communication so that it can be sent securely. These encrypted messages can then be sent directly to a recipient’s mail server or can be further secured with a web-based portal.
However, one of the most difficult aspects of encrypting emails is ensuring that employees actually use it. The fact is that many email encryption processes are cumbersome and therefore are not used frequently. Funnily enough, Edward Snowden had the same problem when he initially reached out to Laura Poitras, one of the journalists who eventually broke the Snowden leaks.
According to Poitras, Snowden contacted her out of the blue anonymously by email. The email was short and to the point, requesting encryption keys and a secure channel. Although Poitras had some experience with secure protocols, what Snowden was asking for was more advanced than her knowledge. Due to the complicated requests, she hesitated to comply.
Luckily, most companies do not need the level of encryption that Snowden was requesting, but they do need a way to make sure that communication is consistently encrypted on the appropriate messages, even when employees do not want to use it.
Automatic Encryption
Google Message Encryption solves this by establishing user defined rules or polices to determine when to encrypt a message. This is a friendly way to ensure the appropriate messages are encrypted.
The encryption process needs to be simple for users Courtesy of tompriest.com
Polices can be defined so that emails are automatically encrypted based on a keyword. For example, a rule can be set so that the encryption is triggered anytime a user types “confidential” in the subject line of an email. Other rules can be set up to look for predefined lexicons.
There are many ways to encrypt email, but few are easier than Google Message Encryption. With just a click of a button, you can enable and disable email encryption inside of Gmail. As with everything in the Gooogle Apps suite, Bi101 can help your business navigate through this new world.
The Snowden leaks prove that secure electronic communication is something that we need, but that we don’t think about. Google Message Encryption solves this by automatically encrypting communication for us. If you would like to know more, please contact us.
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