This site offers free S/MIME certificates. They should be usable by both Netscape and Internet Explorer (version >= 5.0).
If you have Netscape Messenger or Outlook Express, you can use our certificates to digitally sign e-mail messages. More importantly, you can advertise them to others and they can then send you encrypted e-mail that only you can read.
Note: We do not recommend the use of Black Helicopter Certificates for business purposes, as we offer no guarantee that they are in fact issued to whom you think they are or that our site for distributing them is secure. We try... but no guarantee. Read on for more details of how this all works
When you apply for a Black Helicopter certificate you provide your name. We have no way of verifying it, we just trust you. You also provide your e-mail address, which is placed in the certificate. When you apply for your certificate we automatically e-mail a password to the address you provide. You then come back to this website and provide that password in order to pick up your certificate. So in essense what we check is that whomever applies for a Black Helicopter Certificate is able to read e-mail sent to the address they provide (one way or the other).
Why not? This service is offered up because we believe it will be useful and will help in the adoption of security technology such as X.509 certificates. We hope to show that providing secure e-mail is not impossible. We do this by removing the barrier to entry that has traditionally existed in the certificate business. In the past in order to obtain a certificate you either needed to be part of an organization that has setup a certificate infrastructure or you needed to purchase one from one of the public CA's. These CA's have offered free certificates, but typically only for a limited lifetime, they were in effect advertising for their commercial offerings.
The Black Helicopter Organization is a not for profit non existant organization. We are not attempting to make any money off of our users, nor do we intend to make our database of who has certificates available to advertisers. However we are working on a directory so that people who have a Black Helicopter Organization certificate can find out who else has one (or more to the point, can query to see if a particular e-mail address has obtained one) so that they can send encrypted e-mail to that person.
If you wish to obtain a Black Helicopter Certificate, just hit the "Yes I want one" button below and follow the instructions!