No one likes to be spied upon. Everywhere you go, you feel
as if you are being watched. With all of the controversy over privacy as of
late, people would like nothing more than to be able to protect their personal
information, and the details of their lives that they deem secret. Sometimes I
even feel as if my phone is bugged, and that the government can and will listen
in on every word that I’m saying. Now, maybe that’s just me being a paranoid
anti-government nervous wreck, but I for one would love to be able to shut the
door that leads into my house of personal knowledge right in the Feds’ faces.
This is quite possible. An app called “Silent Circle,”
commandeered by ex-Navy SEAL commando Mike Janke, provides one of the most
secure encryption programs in the world. Silent Circle was released for iPhones
and iPads last October with a revolutionary “burn” function that allows the
user to set a time limit on anything you send through Silent Circle to another
person, which deletes the file after a certain amount of time. The complex
encryptions used in this process are so intricate that the government is having
quite a hard time hacking into them. The government has even demanded backdoor
access, but Janke has vehemently refused as it defeats the entire purpose of
his creation. Many telecom firms gladly hand over data on users to the
authorities with barely any supervision and the utmost of secretive methods,
and Silent Circle looks to combat this.
Silent Circle will publish, biannually, reports that show
which countries are requesting backdoor access, and the amount of people they
have requested information about. All of the payment process is handled through
a third party, meaning that even if the Feds gained access to those payment
records, they still have no right to any data on customers. The only way for
the Feds to do so would be to infect the smartphones before the encryptions have been set in place.
However, very soon, Silent Circle will release a new aspect
of the app: users can send files at
the touch of a button, with the same “burn” function described earlier. Files
as large as 60MB can be sent instantaneously to another Silent Circle device,
and are deleted at a pre-designated time set by the sender. Photos, videos,
documents, and music can be sent with little to no effort and the best part is:
it’s safe! This allows for easy encryption right at the tip of your fingers,
and I personally am quite excited to use this new app! (Once it comes out for
Android, of course.)
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