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When the NSA surveillance news broke last year it sent shockwaves through CERN, the particle physics laboratory in Switzerland. Andy Yen, a PhD student, took to the Young at CERN Facebook group with a simple message: “I am very concerned about the privacy issue, and I was wondering what I could do about it.”

Encrypted emails have actually been around since the 1980s, but they are extremely difficult to use. When Edward Snowden asked a reporter to use an end-to-end encrypted email to share details of the NSA surveillance program the reporter couldn’t get the system to work, says Yen.

physics to found ProtonMail, a gmail-like email system which uses end-to-end encryption, making it impossible for outside parties to monitor.

“We encrypt the data on the browser before it comes to the server,” he explains. “By the time the data comes to the server it’s already encrypted

While half the team is now at MIT, some are still in Switzerland where the ProtonMail’s servers are housed for extra protection.

Yen has turned down venture capital firms looking to invest in ProtonMail.

ProtonMail’s revenue model is similar to something like Dropbox – charging only for extra storage.

“One of our motivations was human rights,” says Yen. “Having privacy is very important from a freedom of speech standpoint.”

The paid accounts will be $5/month and will provide 1GB of storage.

We entrust our most sensitive, private, and important information to technology companies like Google, Facebook, and Verizon. Collectively, these companies are privy to the conversations, photos, social connections, and location data of almost everyone online. The choices these companies make affect the privacy of every one of their users. So which companies stand with their users, embracing transparency around government data requests? Which companies have resisted improper government demands by fighting for user privacy in the courts and on Capitol Hill? In short, which companies have your back?

These questions are even more important in the wake of the past year’s revelations about mass surveillance, which showcase how the United States government has been taking advantage of the rich trove of data we entrust to technology companies to engage in surveillance of millions of innocent people in the US and around the world.

THE MOST INTERESTING DEVICE shown at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona this week was the secure Blackphone developed by Silent Circle and Geeksphone.

The Blackphone features anonymous search, automatic disabling of non-trusted WiFi hotspots, and private texting, calling and file transfer capabilities. It’s available to the general public, and bundles additional security features that apparently go beyond the basic messaging security provided by Blackberry to enterprise customers in its Blackberry Messaging (BBM) service.

Whether or not you’re interested in the Blackphone to secure your phone calls and messages from unwarranted snooping by government intelligence agencies in the US, UK and elsewhere, there are other measures you can take to keep your private communications secure from the prying Five Eyes and others, and these have become easier to use in recent years.

There’s Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) for email as implemented by the OpenPGP Alliance and the GnuPG project for all major operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, BSD, Android and iOS. There are also a number of secure email service providers.

For online chat, there’s the Off The Record (OTR) plugin for Pidgin with several implementations.

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The revelations have led to questions concerning the safety of many US-based technology services, with some suggesting that consumers should boycott or avoid companies based in the country, whether they’ve been implicated in the leaks or not. (Many companies are unable to reveal government requests.)

The acquisition will allow AppDirect to better serve businesses seeking to use a privately-hosted cloud infrastructure instead of relying on public clouds. Daniel Saks, the company’s chief executive, says that this capability will become increasingly important as businesses adopt hybrid infrastructures which rely on both privately-and publicly-hosted networks.

“People are certainly more afraid of the cloud for certain things but are embracing it for others,” Saks says. “Our response to that is, let’s give customers options.”

US-based cloud networks have advantages over private networks, Saks says — namely that they can be more reliable and easier to scale. Privately-hosted networks, meanwhile, are often seen as more secure and less likely to be tampered with by the US government. Hybrid solutions are meant to offer the best of both set-ups.

“Businesses need to make the choice that their data is confidential and that it needs added security,” Saks says. They can use a private network to host that data, he says; for other information and services they can use public networks.

That approach is riddled with potentially — or perhaps probably — faulty assumptions, of course. Most of us are unaware of the NSA and other government agencies’ ability to gather information from anything connected to the Internet, whether it’s a smartphone or a privately-hosted network.

Relying on a private network to keep data secure is like hoping that encryption will protect your communications or that a blanket will ward off nightmarish creatures in the middle of the night: it might make some businesses and citizens feel better, but it’s unlikely to make much of a difference in practice.