We’re here at the MIT Knight Civic Media Conference, where Alberto Ibarguen and John Bracken have just announced the winners of the latest news challenge, which asked the question “How can we strengthen the Internet for free expression and innovation?” Sands Fish and I were there to liveblog the presentation of grantees.
TextSecure by Moxie Marlinspike at Open Whisper Systems, is a project to secure global communications through a simple messaging application that requires no special knowledge from the user .
Lili Akai gets on stage to help us understand why TextSecure is so important. Journalists sometimes want to have a private communication with a source, privately. Citizens want to resist pervasive online surveillance. Right now, if you want to communicate securely, you need to learn lots of different kinds of specialized information. Even the YouTube video rumored to be created by Edward Snowden for Glen Greenwald was unsuccessful. Our existing tools like PGP has failed “The Greenwald Test”
TextSecure is a secure, open source messaging app that adds a layer of security that is almost invisible to the users. If you send a message to another TextSecure user, this content is automatically encrypted so that only the intended user can read it. If the person only has SMS, it will send it as a text. Once they do upgrade their phone to handle encrypted communications, it will send an encrypted message. Group chat has been added this year, which is also encrypted.
Messages will also be encrypted on your phone, ensuring that your messages will be encrypted on your phone as well as in transit.
- Axolotl – Open encryption protocol
- TextSecure – Secure text and chat for Android
- RedPhone – Secure voice calls for Android
- A thriving open source community
The team is using funds from Knight to yo merge all these visions into an integrated system that also works iPhone and Desktop computers.