new layer of internet
By shielding users from exposing their metadata, I believe that we can help whistleblowers feel more comfortable with speaking out and can help them to sleep soundly once they do. We can help journalists do important investigative work without putting their well being and the well being of their loved ones at stake. A student can gain access to the near total sum of human knowledge without teaching advertisers how to trick them into buying more stuff they don’t need. With the new layer of the internet, we can create a new world where free communication and free exchange are both safe and easy.
You are being tracked. And honestly, at this point, you’re probably getting sick of being reminded. In the last decade or so both developers and the public at large have begun to wake up to the sheer degree of surveillance we are all exposed to every day of our lives. And we’re starting to push back against this brave new world that we’ve stumbled into.
It’s finally becoming chic to encrypt your communications. You see this with end to end encryption coming baked into many new messaging apps, for example. Encryption is even supported as an opt-in feature in Facebook messenger now. This is a great step forward. Unfortunately it isn’t quite enough.
When you encrypt your communications you make the data very difficult for malicious actors to access, but you’ll usually still create large amounts of metadata, and often, the metadata is what an attacker cares the most about. The National Security Agency’s PRISM project, for example, focused specifically on cataloging and analyzing the metadata created by our communications. Sometimes how you say something is more important than what you say.