One of the founders of the Pirate Bay is building a mobile application with end-to-end encryption so that only the sender and recipient can gain access to the messages sent across the network.

Mock work up of the encryption app Heml.is

Pirate Bay founder explains Heml.is

In response to the NSA revelations about government spying on Internet communications, Peter Sunde, one of the individuals behind The Pirate Bay, along with Linus Olsson and Leif Högberg are looking to build a mobile application with end-to-end encryption so that only the sender and recipient can gain access to the messages sent across the network. The app, which is currently under development, is to be built through funding by crowd-sourcing – and is asking for small donations from users to fund the project via Paypal or Bitcoin. The company won’t sell user data or sell advertising and claim that no-one will be able to listen in, “not even us”. If the team don’t raise their fundraising goal they promise to refund all of the money. Already they have raised more than $20,000 toward their target of $100K. The app is to be built for both the iOS and Android platforms initially, with other platforms to be considered later. The service, which is called “Heml.is” (Hemlis means secret in Sweden), will run a freemium model meaning it will be free to users, but will charge a small fee to unlock some features of the application. For example, $5 earns two shareable codes to unlock app features; $50 gets 10 unlock codes, the ability to pre-register three user names, and your name in the application. The web domain (heml.is) is based in Iceland (the .is = country code Top Level Domain for Iceland as have made it known it will not bow down to foreign interests, are known for their data protection and “has proven that they do not cave in to pressure easily”.The company has claimed they were motivated to make the application by the whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA spying on Internet communications. Snowden provided documents to The Guardian, which he said highlighted that the NSA has widespread access to peoples' data. The NSA has argued that their actions are legal and have served to deter terrorism.An entry on the heml.is blog claims that “As part of the on-going mass surveillance, internet traffic is currently being stored and indexed in massive databases, allowing the data to be analysed, searched and ultimately read at a later time. This affects everything we do online, from emails to search statistics and even our daily activities on social sites such as Facebook or Twitter.”“While we won’t be able to provide you with 100% privacy, we believe that we can make your conversations private enough to render mass surveillance ineffective.” The application promises to encrypt all traffic from phone to phone so even if it passes through systems meant to monitor content, it can’t be read.Heml.is seems to be concerned more about the NSA’s sociograms program rather than the contents of private communications. Sociograms are graphical representations of social links that a person has. Graphs drawn with plots outline the structure of interpersonal relations in a group situation. “Our intent is that by encrypting and then tunnelling all messages through the Heml.is network we are making it more difficult for them to data mine or build sociograms from your communications. The surveillance systems can see that you are using Heml.is but they can’t see what takes place inside the network.”