Hushmail turns out to be anything but

Found on IT News on Friday, 16 November 2007
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A court document in a drug smuggling case has shown that the private email service Hushmail has been cooperating with police in handing over user emails..

Hushmail claims to offer unreadable email as it uses PGP encryption technology and a company specific key management system that it says will ensure only the sender and recipient can read the emails. However it seems the Canadian company has been divulging keys to the American authorities.

The news will be embarrassing to the company, which has made much of its ability to ensure that emails are not read by the authorise, including the FBI's Carnivore email monitoring software.

"Hushmail's security cannot be broken or weakened by this government sponsored snooping software," the company states.

Letting a third party manage the encryption of your email? Isn't that a failure by default already? I never understood the attention Hushmail got; after all, there's PGP/GPG.