![]() ![]() "Economic espionage has been going on for centuries," he says. Jarad Carleton, a principal consultant at Frost & Sullivan, thinks investment bank mergers-and-acquisition teams could put software such as Bitmessage to good use. "I don't know that a lawyer today will feel he's meeting his ethical obligations if he talks to his client on the phone." Not only medical records but lawyer-client communications," says Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, a research group dedicated to libertarian principles. "Now that we understand how intrusive the government is being, it will be more important for the business sector to secure data. While Bitmessage's creator says he was motivated by politics rather than profit - Warren says his political inclinations are "libertarian-ish"-experts say the software has commercial potential. "It's the most secure messaging system that I've ever seen," says Johannes Ullrich, chief research officer of the SANS Institute, an organization that certifies computer security specialists. For ease of use, the new addresses can be stored and shared as a QR code, the pixelated squares that can be scanned with a smartphone. Those who download the free software can create alternate e-mail addresses that are 36-character-long strings of letters and numbers. Unlike competing products, Bitmessage also shields the identity of the parties in any online communication. Before that, most of the people using the software were in China now more than 80 percent of downloads come from the U.S. Downloads of Bitmessage, which was introduced in November 2012, have more than quintupled since news broke in early June about NSA snooping, Warren says. Warren drew inspiration from Bitcoin, the open-source protocol that established a virtual currency. It would be much more difficult to block access to the Bitmessage network," says Adam Melton, a developer who collaborated with Warren. "Right now, if the Iranian government wants to block Twitter or Gmail, they can. To retrieve a copy of an e-mail sent using Bitmessage, the government would have to gain access to an individual's computer. Instead, the encryption software uses peer-to-peer technology that links computers into what is known as a distributed network. "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. New York developer Jonathan Warren says he had the NSA and its spying techniques very much in mind when creating the software. 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. ![]()
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