The brand new program, which Stamos said could be prepared for installation by the beginning of 2016, featured “end to end” encryption, meaning that even Yahoo itself would not be able to decrypt messages stored on its servers.

Yahoo guaranteed to make such encryption user friendly, building on open-source applications for end to end email encryption that Google has been developing.

James Comey, manager of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, summarized those thoughts in July when he told the Senate Judiciary Committee that “we’ve on a fresh scale found mainstream merchandise and services designed in ways that provides users exclusive control over access to their information.” He pointed to the essential part of technology businesses, saying, “We want to stress that the Going Black issue is, at base, one of technological choices and ability.”

The consequence of the statement of Comey was clear: The products and services alluded to would need to be shut down in America if businesses were prohibited by law from offering such secrecy protections. Really, the Obama administration indicated in October that it’d not request technology firms to build back doors in their encryption products, given the strong chance that weakening security in this manner would empower malicious foreign agents and criminal hackers to undermine more systems than they’re doing.

Such problems are not so strong on the other side of the Atlantic, however.

Thus are Google and Yahoo headed on a collision course with the U.K. authorities over their end to end email encryption? “I do not believe they’re putting the resources behind it that it wants,” says Green. He estimates that Google has one or two programmers working on end to end email encryption, too few to match the challenge of producing a system that is really versatile. Yahoo, also, has not dedicated resources that are sufficient to the endeavor to make their efforts successful, claims Green.
Christopher Soghoian, main technologist of the American Civil Liberties Union, is likewise doubtful, qualifying these jobs at Yahoo and Google as post-Snowden “feel good” exercises. “That sort of personal digital assistant is potential only if they see everything you are doing.”

While he, also, recognizes the PR worth Google and Yahoo gain from these jobs, a technology fellow in the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Joseph Bonneau, in San Francisco, believes that these tech giants’ interest in developing end to end email encryption is real. “It is undoubtedly a problem that Google and Yahoo want to solve,” he says. It is only that the challenges which come alongside encrypting email are tremendous. They contain figuring out the best way to handle people’s cryptographic keys in ways that’s safe and yet does not make users prone to losing access to their email archives, how to filter junk when just the end user can read the messages, and how to empower users to hunt through their previous messages. “The encounter of Gmail would be a lot different in the event you could not search,” notes Bonneau.

Both Yahoo and Google refused interview requests, so it is tough to judge whether these firms actually are determined to supply their users with encrypted email this year. It may still delay even should they wind up placing serious strength supporting the attempt. It is a better bet the primary battleground in the cryptowars of this year will not be email as instant messaging services like WhatsApp and iMessage, where users have fewer expectations for junk hunting and filtering. What makes end to end encryption in these messaging services so appealing and popular, Bonneau says, is, ironically, that “nobody understands it is there.”