[liberationtech] Silent Circle to publish source code?

[Nathan]

Here's my prediction: Silent Circle will not fundamentally change anything. It will have no where near the impact that Phil's work on open cryptography standards has. It may be a great niche product for businesses, professional journalist groups and large NGOs looking for a turnkey solution. It will not be relevant for the majority people on the ground in high risk places with state based surveillance. It will not satisfy the most privacy concerned users in "free" countries either. 

Ultimately it is a *commercial product* aiming to package up complex capabilities into a promise of a tidy easy to use solutions. It is a worthy endeavor but there are many, many people out there trying to go the business route and I don't believe there is actually enough of a market for this to satisfy a venture capitalist or organic revenue to sustain itself. Cryptophone, WaveSecure, Cryptcell, IronKey, ZeroBank, Hushmail are just a few attempted similar efforts. All worthy efforts... but niche and ultimately not having the large impact we all might hope, and perhaps some even doing damage by promoting forked, out of date solutions.

I fundamentally believe you can't design a product both for CEOs and revolutionaries. The threat models are entirely different. You can't be all things to all people especially if you are charging 20 USD per user per month, on top of a users existing 3g data plan.

+n8fr8



Nadim Kobeissi <nadim at nadim.cc> wrote:

>It would have been much nicer to create this thread based on real source
>code, instead of a tweet based on word of mouth. We'll see.
>
>NK
>
>On 10/11/2012 3:27 PM, Yosem Companys wrote:
>> Dan Gillmor @dangillmor: @kaepora Phil Zimmerman told me yesterday
>> that Silent Circle (contrary to what you say in your post) will
>> publish source code.
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