When the National Security Agency started listening in on the ordinary conversations of American citizens, they were looking for leads that would uncover potential acts of terrorism. Their actions ultimately created a market demand for technology to protect people from the NSA’s intrusiveness.

About a month ago, Peter Sunde, one of the co-founders behind the controversial Swedish website Pirate Bay (a website that assists peer-to-peer file sharing through bit-torrent practices), launched a crowd source funding campaign to start an app called Hemlis (which means “secret” in Swedish). This app could provide the privacy that people are looking for.

Because we live in a world where people are constantly communicating through different variations of messaging, people want platforms like Hemlis to provide them safe messaging.

Hemlis will be a new secure mobile messaging app. Its release date has yet to be determined. This app would be different from others because it will use end-to-end encryption, which can be defined as data protection. Basically, data is protected because only the person sending the transaction and the person on the receiving end have the ability to see the plaintext of the data.

The app is incredibly important, especially since wiretapping and forms of human rights violating surveillance have often characterized the largest and most terrorizing regimes in history.

First, in 1941 there was Joseph Stalin, the fascist ruler of the Soviet Union who used a secret police to crush any rebellions that stood in his way. Then you have the current Communist Regime in China that has been practicing extreme Internet censorship, text message surveillance and phone hacking for more than a decade.

The United States government has constantly criticized these leaderships for infringing on human rights. However, recently, the U.S. government has had a healthy dose of their own words come right back to them. With all of the controversy surrounding the NSA and Gmail’s privacy being questioned, it is hard not to notice similarities between the U.S. government and the Communist China and Stalin regimes.

The main difference is that America’s free market and “equality of opportunity” attitude will turn this infraction of privacy into a big market opportunity.

Hemlis started as a crowd source-funding goal with the mission of raising $100,000.
According to an article on Reddit.com, the team raised about $18,500 on July 9.

However, on the Hemlis website blog, a post on July 11 reveals that Hemlis had been 100 percent funded in 36 hours. This demonstrates the frustration people have after hearing the truths behind the NSA, and furthermore shows the demand people have for privacy. Hemlis has been smart enough to notice this trend in the market. They have positioned and marketed the app with the pure purpose of providing people with privacy by refusing to use advertising or sell user data on the app.

They also plan to make the core of the app free, only charging small fees for special features.

As more leaks about the NSA and their activities arise, there will be more and more opportunity for platforms and programs that can protect the privacy of an individual user.

Already, businesses are considering the newly developed search engines StartPage and Ixquick. These search engines are the first of their kind to enable “Perfect Forward Secrecy” (PFS), which is supposed to disable any search traffic from being intercepted. Still, one can always wonder if any website is ever truly secure, especially when a country’s government is working with far more resources.

Even the Hemlis website will tell you that you can never be sure if something is actually 100 percent secure. However, Hemlis has given us insight into one definite certainty: Ordinary American citizens are going to fight as they always have when they believe their human rights are being challenged.

Bram Berkowitz is a senior advertising and entrepreneurship major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at [email protected].

Published on August 29, 2013 at 2:20 am