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Wickr offers messaging so secure that even the NSA can’t read it

The US government’s National Security Agency and its recently-unmasked snooping isn’t a hugely South African issue, but it raises interesting points about privacy that are, in my opinion, universal.

So when I came across a press release from a San Francisco-based company called Wickr, detailing its own messaging application that includes a bunch of security measures that even the NSA can’t break, I was immediately intrigued.

The app was originally launched for iOS, but according to the press release a version for Android has just entered the “public beta phase” that anyone with an Android phone or tablet can participate in, making Wickr available to over 90% of the world’s smartphone users. Wickr is also free to download, and just like the other big players in the messaging space like WeChat, BBM and WhatsApp, it uses just a tiny bit of cellular data to send and receive messages, photos, videos and voice messages.

So what makes Wickr so secure? Well, it uses military-grade encryption to secure whatever the app sends that keeps messages/photos/voice messages safe from snooping while in transit; every message can be set to self-destruct, leaving no trace whatsoever; Wickr doesn’t store any of the encryption keys on their own servers and no personal data is ever collected about the sender or receiver, and every communication is proxied, which means even the locations of sender and receiver can not be identified. That’s a whole lot of security.

In terms of what that means for you, the South African texter, it gives you the option to completely “anonymise” any text messages you send to your contacts both here and abroad.

Dr. Robert Statica, the cofounder and CTO of Wickr, stated in the press release that Wickr is “Bound by the strong belief that private correspondence is a universal human right”, hence the app’s existence. Even better, Statica went on to say that “white-hat hackers” (“ethical” hackers who do what they do for what they believe to be the greater good) test Wickr on a continuous basis to ensure its integrity.

That’s quite a commitment to privacy, and definitely a philosophy I can get behind.

If you want to try Wickr out for yourself, it’s currently available on Apple’s iTunes Store for iOS devices, and from Google’s Play Store if you own an Android phone or tablet.

[Update]: If you think the NSA and their snooping isn’t relevant to you as a South African, think again. ZDNet published a story on Monday about a Belgian telecoms company, Belgacom, whose network was attacked last week by an unnamed third party suspected of being the NSA, based on Belgacom’s admission to the Dutch newspaper De Standaard that the NSA had quite likely been attacking their network since as far back as 2011. The thing is, MTN owns a 20% stake in Belgacom and its operations form part of MTN’s international network, meaning South African data could potentially have also been intercepted by the US security agency.

Wickr’s looking pretty right right about now, isn’t it?

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