A Private Language

Transcript

1. Julian Pankratz

   This is Audio Logs. I’m Julian Pankratz. Glossia, Frothly’s encrypted messaging protocol, turns fifteen this year, and version 4.0 ships in a couple of weeks. Gideon Ravenor leads the program. Gideon, welcome.

2. Gideon Ravenor

   Thank you, Julian. Fifteen years. I was rather younger when we started.

3. Julian Pankratz

   Let’s start with the name. Where does Glossia come from?

4. Gideon Ravenor

   From a private cant invented by a small group of colleagues I worked with early in my career. We often had to speak openly in rooms full of strangers, so the man who led us built a language for it, out of fragments of other languages, private references and jokes only we understood. He is now Frothly’s president. When we started designing a protocol, it seemed right to borrow the name.

5. Julian Pankratz

   Did he approve?

6. Gideon Ravenor

   He said it was the first sensible use anyone had made of it. From him, that is high praise.

7. Julian Pankratz

   Your essay last year argued that encryption is a cultural right, not just a technical feature. Can you explain?

8. Gideon Ravenor

   People have always kept private languages: traders, workers, families, persecuted communities. They protect the ability to speak freely among your own. Encryption is the latest form of that very old practice. When governments ask for a way into it, they are not asking for a technical feature. They are asking communities to give up something they have always had.

9. Julian Pankratz

   You have a personal stake in that.

10. Gideon Ravenor

    I do. For reasons listeners may know, I spend a good part of my day speaking through a machine. I have strong opinions about who else gets to listen.

11. Julian Pankratz

    What’s new in 4.0?

12. Gideon Ravenor

    The headline is post-quantum key exchange. Messages sent today could be recorded and stored until someone builds a computer capable of breaking today’s encryption. For most people that is a distant worry. For a journalist protecting a source, it is not, because the source will still be alive in twenty years. So we now combine established cryptography with newer algorithms designed to resist that attack.

13. Julian Pankratz

    And it’s faster.

14. Gideon Ravenor

    Up to forty percent faster on poor connections, which is where our users actually are. We design for the worst conditions first: slow networks, shared phones, devices that may be seized at a border. If it works there, it works everywhere.

15. Julian Pankratz

    What are you proudest of, after fifteen years?

16. Gideon Ravenor

    That we have never held anyone’s keys, and so have never had anything to hand over. Several times people have come asking. Each time the answer was the same, and it was true: we cannot read it. A private language only stays private if nobody outside the conversation can.

17. Julian Pankratz

    Gideon Ravenor, thank you.

18. Gideon Ravenor

    Thank you, Julian.