![]() Revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance program of the e-mails and phone records of Americans have been a boon to makers of commercial encryption programs such as Hushmail and Silent Circle. Yet unless customers bother to read these programs’ service agreements, they may not realize these companies-just like tech giants Google ( GOOG) and Yahoo! ( YHOO)-honor requests for customer data made by governments and courts in cases involving potential security threats. That’s one reason a new open-source encryption standard called Bitmessage, which is out of the NSA’s reach and devilishly difficult to crack, is seeing a surge in users. New York-based developer Jonathan Warren says he had the NSA and its spying techniques very much in mind when creating the software. “If I wasn’t reasonably sure they were tracking our metadata, I wouldn’t have done it,” says the 28-year-old, who worked on Bitmessage in his spare time while employed at an educational company he declined to identify.īitmessage isn’t owned by a corporation, nor does it rely on a centralized server that can be accessed by the government. Over the past twenty years, the democratization of cryptographic technology has brought us the potential for an unprecedented level of privacy, giving the common man the ability to browse documents, have conversations, and now, with Bitcoin, send money to people around the world without even the most powerful corporations and government agencies. Instead, the encryption software uses peer-to-peer technology that links computers into what is known as a distributed network. To retrieve a copy of an e-mail sent using Bitmessage, the government would have to gain access to an individual’s computer. Bitmessage is a decentralized, encrypted, peer-to-peer, trustless communications protocol that can be used by one person to send encrypted messages to. “Right now, if the Iranian government wants to block Twitter or Gmail, they can. It would be much more difficult to block access to the Bitmessage network,” says Adam Melton, a developer who collaborated with Warren. ![]() Warren drew inspiration from Bitcoin, the open-source protocol that established a virtual currency. Downloads of Bitmessage, which was introduced in November 2012, have more than quintupled since news broke in early June about NSA snooping, Warren says.
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