Author: Andy Greenberg / Source: WIRED
In the four or so years since it launched, end-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal has become the security community’s gold standard for surveillance-resistant communications.
Its creators have built an encryption protocol that companies from WhatsApp to Facebook Messenger to Skype have all added to their own products to offer truly private conversations to billions of people. And it’s done so as a non-profit with, at any given moment, a tiny staff that includes just two or three full-time coders. Now imagine what it might accomplish with actual Silicon Valley money behind it.On Wednesday, the creators of Signal announced the launch of the Signal Foundation, which will build and maintain Signal and potentially other privacy-focused apps to come, too. WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton has also joined as the foundation’s executive chairman, his first new role since leaving WhatsApp last fall. And Acton’s not only devoting the next phase of his post-WhatsApp career to Signal, but a fair-sized chunk of his WhatsApp billions, too: He’s personally injecting $50 million into the project.
“Our plan is to pioneer a new model of technology nonprofit focused on privacy and data protection for everyone, everywhere,” Acton wrote in a blog post announcing the move along with Moxie Marlinspike, the cypherpunk programmer who first created Signal and founded Open Whisper Systems, the non-profit organization that has run Signal until now.
“Moxie and his team have built something very special in Signal Messenger and I am thrilled to join their effort to provide the most trusted communications experience on the planet.”In an email to WIRED, Acton writes that since leaving WhatsApp’s parent company Facebook last September, he’s now free to pursue his long-held ideals: transparent, open-source development and uncompromising data protection. “I’m now in a place where I can devote substantial amounts of my time and resources to advance technology in these areas,” Acton writes. “It’s more important to me that we focus on these core ideals than to go off and chase technological fads that are not going to survive into the future.
Acton has known Marlinspike since 2013,…
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