Moxie Marlinspike: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.wsj.com/articles/moxie-marlinspike-the-coder-who-encrypted-your-texts-1436486274

By DANNY YADRON
The Wall Street Journal
July 9, 2015

SAN FRANCISCO -- In the past decade, Moxie Marlinspike has squatted on an 
abandoned island, toured the U.S. by hopping trains, he says, and earned 
the enmity of government officials for writing software.

Mr. Marlinspike created an encryption program that scrambles messages 
until they reach the intended reader. It’s so simple that Facebook Inc.’s 
WhatsApp made it a standard feature for many of the app’s 800 million 
users.

The software is effective enough to alarm governments. Earlier this year, 
shortly after WhatsApp adopted it, British Prime Minister David Cameron 
called protected-messaging apps a “safe space” for terrorists. The 
following week, President Barack Obama called them “a problem.”

That makes the lanky, dreadlocked and intensely private coder a central 
figure in an escalating debate about government and commercial 
surveillance. In a research paper released Tuesday, 15 prominent 
technologists cited three programs relying on Mr. Marlinspike’s code as 
options for shielding communications.

His encrypted texting and calling app, Signal, has come up in White House 
meetings, says an attendee. Speaking via video link last year as part of a 
panel on surveillance, former National Security Agency contractor Edward 
Snowden, who leaked troves of U.S. spying secrets, urged listeners to use 
“anything” that Mr. Marlinspike releases.

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