I'd been wondering when the explosive kickstarter campaign that leverages the NSA news would appear.
My feelings about projects like these are always complicated. Even though it's encouraging to see that people are excited about building secure communication platforms, my initial reaction to announcements like these is typically extreme dread.
There is a small community of people who have been working on secure mobile messaging for years, and unfortunately newcomers to secure communication generally fuck it up. Not only is that bad for users, but it's bad for those of us who have put years of effort into this, because it sets a tone where users begin to assume that all apps which attempt to provide secure communication must have done it incorrectly, so it's not worth using any of them.
I think there are probably enough apps in this space now (TextSecure, ChatSecure, Gibberbot, Silent Circle) that these folks could have probably just partnered with or contributed to an existing project in order to meet their needs. Despite the article's subtitle, this will be far from "the first secure mobile messaging system."
My feelings about projects like these are always complicated. Even though it's encouraging to see that people are excited about building secure communication platforms, my initial reaction to announcements like these is typically extreme dread.
There is a small community of people who have been working on secure mobile messaging for years, and unfortunately newcomers to secure communication generally fuck it up. Not only is that bad for users, but it's bad for those of us who have put years of effort into this, because it sets a tone where users begin to assume that all apps which attempt to provide secure communication must have done it incorrectly, so it's not worth using any of them.
I think there are probably enough apps in this space now (TextSecure, ChatSecure, Gibberbot, Silent Circle) that these folks could have probably just partnered with or contributed to an existing project in order to meet their needs. Despite the article's subtitle, this will be far from "the first secure mobile messaging system."