Pirate Bay founder working on spy-proof text messaging app

Peter Sunde, the co-founder of BitTorrent search engine The Pirate Bay, is working on developing a secure mobile messaging app and service that's intended to be safe from government surveillance and be user friendly at the same time.

The app will be called Heml.is -- hemlis means secret in Swedish -- and will be initially developed for Android and iOS. It will provide end-to-end encryption, meaning that messages will be encrypted with keys generated on the end user devices and the service provider won't have access to the plaintext information.

The idea to create Heml.is came following the recent revelations in the media about the extent of the surveillance programs of the U.S. National Security Agency and other government agencies, Sunde said Wednesday via email. "We can't deal with being this monitored!" he said.

There aren't many options for secure mobile messaging, Sunde said. There are secure applications, but not entire systems that could be considered secure, he said. There are questions hanging over the infrastructure those applications are running on and the country in which that infrastructure is located, he said.

"We're unfortunately the only group that is focusing on the whole picture, not just the technology," he said.

Secret documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden suggest that the NSA is collecting data on user communications from online service providers including Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and others as part of a surveillance program called Prism.

The infrastructure used for Heml.is will be based in jurisdictions chosen specifically to maximize user protection, Sunde said. Different organizations will own different parts of the infrastructure -- the servers and data -- in order to protect the privacy of users.

:story: Computerworld