Pirate Bay Torrent Looks to Encrypt the Entire Internet From â??Prying Eyesâ??

Pirate Bay Torrent Looks to Encrypt the Entire Internet From â??Prying Eyesâ??

Janko Roettgers / NewTeeVee | July 10, 2008

The team behind the popular torrent site The Pirate Bay has started to work on a new encryption technology that could potentially protect all Internet traffic from prying eyes. The project, which is still in its initial stages, goes by the name â??Transparent end-to-end encryption for the Internets,â?� or IPETEE for short. It tackles encryption not on the application level, but on the network level, the aim being that all data exchanged on your PC would be encrypted, regardless of its nature â?? be it a web browser streaming video files or an instant messaging client. As Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij (a.k.a. Tiamo) told me, â??Even applications that donâ??t supporting encryption will be encrypted where possible.â?�

Neij came up with the idea for IPETEE back when European politicians were starting to debate a Europe-wide move to DMCA-like copyright enforcement efforts, which were eventually authorized in the form of the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive in the spring of 2007. â??I wanted to come up with something to make it harder for data retention,â?� said Neij. But he didnâ??t publish the initial draft proposal until early this month, when the discussion about privacy and surveillance online suddenly became urgent again. The Swedish parliament passed a new law in June that allows a local government agency to snoop on â??the telephony, emails, and web traffic of millions of innocent individuals,â?� as the EFFâ??s Danny Oâ??Brien put it. Neij promises that his new encryption scheme will be ready before the law takes effect next January.




IPETEE will likely be implemented as an add-on to operating systems like Windows and OS X. It will essentially do its work in the background, handling all incoming and outgoing IP traffic without any further interference from the user.

Letâ??s say you want to open a video download from a remote machine. IPETEE would first test whether the remote machine is supporting the crypto technology; once thatâ??s confirmed it would then exchange encryption keys with the machine before transmitting your actual request and sending the video file your way. All data would automatically be unscrambled once it reaches your machine, so there would be no need for your media player or download manager to support any new encryption technologies. And if the remote machine didnâ??t know how to handle encryption, the whole transfer would fall back to an unencrypted connection.

Neij told me that IPETEE could be easily implemented for data transfers between end users, such as files shared through P2P. â??The proof-of-concept code will be available both on Windows and Linux,â?� he explained, but the next step would be to make it scalable and available for operations in a server-based environment so that administrators could use IPETEE to protect their usersâ?? web or email transmissions.

IPETEE could be a big step towards standardizing the encryption of web, email and even VoIP traffic, but it wouldnâ??t protect against all types of interference. Your ISP could still kill your video downloads via BitTorrent, because newer traffic management solutions can identify P2P transfers by simply looking at the patterns of your uploads and downloads and not at the individual data packets. It could also potentially slow down certain transfers, because it takes time to establish encrypted connections. There might be other flaws in the architecture of the IPETEE system as well, which is why Neijâ??s team is currently talking to crypto and network experts. But he seemed optimistic that he would have at least a proof of concept implementation ready by the end of the year.

Of course, the Pirate Bay folks donâ??t exactly have a good track record when it comes to following through with their plans. NewTeeVee alumn Jackson West pointed out back in March that long-planned projects like The Video Bay, the music site PlayBle and a new and secure P2P protocol have yet to be launched, and thatâ??s still true today. Adding an ambitious project like IPETEE to the list doesnâ??t seem likely to solve that problem, but maybe this time Neij and his crew will overcome their ADD.

Great news! hope it gets made. The surveillance society is getting out of control.

cooooool

if they don't follow through with it, someone else will come along and make something similar.