Clique press releases

New software drowns out NSA surveillance

DAYTON, OHIO July 26, 2014 — A computer security researcher at Wright State University has released a new tool for communicating invisibly over the Internet. The new software, named Clique, works by organizing users into large groups where everyone is always communicating, whether or not any particular pair of users actually knows one another or has anything of significance to say. This arrangement prevents eavesdroppers from being able to determine if an intercepted message has actual meaning, or is simply one more among millions of encrypted decoys.

“Millions are frustrated concerning the assimilation of their electronic communication by intelligence agencies, yet this problem is actually within human capability of solving,” writes Marc Abel, a Ph.D. student affiliated with the project. “There is always a tradeoff between convenience and security that every user has to make. Even online freedom isn’t free. But Clique offers unprecedented freedom to drop out of the dragnet completely, even when communicating across international boundaries, provided one is ready to invest the talent and patience needed to cope with a new system.”

It’s not only Clique’s users who will need to cope with change. Clique’s communications are immune to conventional interception methods while en route, so intelligence agencies will have to revert to older, costlier means of monitoring in order to target communicants, reducing the number of citizens an agency can track. Lawmakers will also face new hurdles. “Because Clique is completely decentralized, it cannot be taken down by changes to existing law, letters from copyright trolls, or other authoritarian regimes,” Abel says. “Now established, the global Clique network will remain in operation until the plug to the very last node gets pulled out of the wall.”

Technical details about the Clique network protocol, as well as the software itself, is available online at http://clique4.us at no cost.