Spy-Proof Messaging Service Launches

Online, June 10, 2014 (Newswire.com) - The team that built Beepip believe it's time to restore rights to online privacy. They believe no one should be subjected to widespread arbitrary interference with online communications. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference, and where such laws are lacking or inadequate, or where governments or corporations are introducing laws or measures to sidestep or reduce these rights, solutions can be created to help people uphold them. Solutions to combat online surveillance are about much more broader values than hiding things—it's about the human need for refuge against scrutiny.

The NSA and the GCHQ screwed up email for everyone. The PRISM and TEMPORA spy programmes revealed the vast appetite that government and corporate snoops have for devouring personal communications. Like morbidly obese fat cats, they became addicted to collecting and consuming internet users' utmost private digital thoughts—intoxicated by the fumes of digital footprints. For them, every morsel of minuscule metadata became a banquet that must be ingested. No crumb was ever too small.

But now it's time for a diet, a big one. The fightback to regain digital privacy has begun, and the first tool in the arsenal is called Beepip—a rethink of how to communicate online.

The problem with email is that it's an old technology that was never designed with privacy and anonymity in mind. A legacy of the early 90's, email works in much the same way as old-fashioned postal mail—when a message is sent it arrives at a central sorting site for processing (the central post office with snail mail and an email server for email). The trouble with these centralised processing systems is that it means ceding control of messages to third parties—there has to be trust that they won't read messages behind people's backs. But what happens when that trust is totally and utterly breached? This is exactly what's happened with email.

Sure, there are protection measures like locks, or encryption as it's called with email, but because email always passes through a central sorting site, there are usually copies of keys that can break into messages without anybody knowing. There's also the problem of non-content data—even if there was a full-proof way of hiding the content of emails, the sender and receiver of emails can never be hidden as the central sorting site needs this information to deliver messages. Email always leaves data trails. Should there really be third-parties knowing who people are having private conversations with?

Beepip is different to email—it's new, improved technology that cuts out the need for middlemen. Instead of relying on a central processing sites like a post office or email server to deliver messages, beepips are sent directly from user to user. It's like delivering a letter to a friend's mailbox yourself because the postie can't be trusted.

Beepip uses a computer's power to scramble and lock messages and then blasts these messages out over the internet, straight to the recipient. Because no central server is used, there is no chance of snooping. With Beepip, you can hide the sender and receiver of the messages and stay completely anonymous. There is also the ability to send out broadcasts—messages that are sent out to any group of Beepip users that are listening. In this way, organisations or individuals can get information out to large numbers of subscribers anonymously and securely if they choose.

Beepip has an easy-to-use interface that brings cryptography and secure communication to non-expert users. It's also less expensive than encrypted email and gives users the ability to create unlimited numbers of identities/addresses at no additional cost. Because Beepip is all about security and privacy, it does not gather any personally identifiable information and allows users to pay with bitcoin.