TrueCrypt Project Problems
Finally, a story for resident conspiracy theorists that has truth behind it, an impact on the world, and may actually mean something.TrueCrypt, the standout semi-open source multiplatform full-disk-encryption software package, has acted all squirrelly and more or less shut the the project down, blaming it, somewhat hilariously, on the end of Microsoft's Windows XP support. All this while a paid (and long awaited) audit of TrueCrypt has been nearing completion.
Discussed at lots of places including lifehacker , Slashdot , SoylentNews , and reddit .
This is really troubling for lots of reasons. The audit was deemed necessary because TC's authorship and operation were shrouded in mystery. (the two main developers are anonymous and go by the pseudonyms "ennead" and "syncon") This doesn't help any in that regard. What happened? Loss of control of the domain? Website defacement? Warrant canary?
I still wonder whether the philosophies of privacy versus power and the distribution of autonomy in society is workable or whether Animal Farm/1984/Brave New World scenarios are inevitable after any post-revolution period of time. TrueCrypt was a tool for those interested in securing some privacy for data? I can imagine many legitimate personal, political and business use cases, as well as, more nefarious intentions. Nonetheless, I hope that we can devise a system/laws that allow such tools to have an accessible, operational and audited presence in the Computer Age. Basically, I feel it is important that power (for privacy or anything else) be distributed and this is a basic principle of democracy. Many of the possible explanations for TrueCrypt's demise appear linked to the lack of enough money to justify continued development though, which begs the question of how an interested community could best fund key programs like OpenSSH, TrueCrypt, etc, and how they might handle key developers moving on?