File Sharing internet protocol BitTorrent, was best known for allowing people to swap pirated movies and music. All at the expense of big Hollywood studios and record labels. However, then came a Belarusian engineer named Konstantin Lissounov. About a year ago, Lissounov joined a hackathon sponsored by his employer, BitTorrent Inc., a company that seeks to transform the peer-to-peer protocol into a legitimate means of file-sharing for both consumers and businesses, and in a matter of hours, he slapped together a new BitTorrent tool that let him quickly and easily send encrypted photos of his three children across dodgy Eastern European network lines to the rest of his family. The tool won first prize at the hackathon, and within a few more months, after Lissounov honed the tool alongside various other engineers, the company delivered BitTorrent Sync, a Dropbox-like service that lets you seamlessly synchronize files across computers and mobile devices.
The difference is that, thanks to the BitTorrent protocol, which connects machines without the help of a central server, the service isn’t controlled by Dropbox or any other organization, including BitTorrent itself. This means it could be less vulnerable to surveillance by the NSA and other government organizations, and that seems to have struck a chord with many people across the net. Each month, according to BitTorrent, about 2 million people now use Sync, including not only individuals but businesses looking for simpler, safer, and more secure ways of sharing data across systems. “It immediately proved magical,” says BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker.
Klinker believes his ten-year-old company’s fortunes are closely tied to this new tool. But beyond that, Sync is part of a larger trend towards internet services that are operated not by a central commercial company, but by independent machines spread across the internet. This includes everything from the bitcoin digital currency to open source tools that seek to replace social networking services like Twitter. They all do very different things, but the common denominator is that they put more control in the hands of the people — and less in the hands of corporations and governments.
Yes, BitTorrent built Sync — Lissounov is a programmer in the company’s Minsk office — but the company doesn’t control where the software routes data or what users do with it. In theory, this can make the service more reliable (you don’t have to worry about BitTorrent going out of business) and more secure (the NSA must try harder to spy on data).
Sync’s 2-million-person footprint is remarkable when you consider the software was released less than a year ago and is still in the beta testing phase. But its timing was excellent: the launch coincided with blockbuster revelations of U.S. government cyber-surveillance and new anxieties about concentrating private information on corporate servers. BitTorrent made the preliminary Sync “alpha” version available to the public in April, and it followed with a beta in July, right after former government contractor Edward Snowden revealed details of invasive NSA surveillance efforts, including a program called PRISM.
“The PRISM thing was a watershed moment internally and externally — suddenly we felt vindicated,” says BitTorrent marketing vice president Matt Mason. “It’s like: ‘We were right. There is a reason to build things in a different way.’”
For the past 15 years, our software and data have steadily moved into the cloud, bringing massive gains in convenience. The cloud makes it easier not only to share data, among other things. But in some ways, it has also eroded our privacy. The NSA, it seems, has been tapping major cloud services in order to spy on users, and the revelations highlighted the dangers of using a file-sharing service like Dropbox. Indeed, some of the leaked NSA documents indicated that Dropbox had been specifically targeted.
But in a departure from Dropbox, Sync doesn’t store data in one central repository that can be tapped by the NSA and others. It connects machines via peer-to-peer networking, meaning they can sync without storing data on any server. That means an interloper can’t access data without tapping each individual machine. The rub is that, in order to synchronize files across multiple systems, all must be online at the same time. But Klinker and company still believe they have a significant advantage over Dropbox, and to exploit this advantage, BitTorrent is rebuilding its operation around Sync, hiring new executives to oversee the product, backing it with an enormous marketing push, and forming plans to make money from what is now a free tool.
This past fall, the company rented billboards in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and without identifying itself, it plastered them with purposely outrageous statements like “your data should belong to the NSA.” Then, after whipping the media into a frenzy, BitTorrent claimed responsibility for the billboards and updated them with anti-surveillance messages.
Like Dropbox, the tool has a wide range of uses. Video editors, the company says, can avoid FedExing hard drives around the country since Sync and the underlying BitTorrent protocol can move gigabytes of daily footage across the internet. System administrators are using the tool to move corporate data onto fresh computer servers. And music lovers are using Sync to browse their massive song libraries on mobile devices with limited storage.
And again, following in the footsteps of Dropbox, developers are turning Sync into a platform for use with all sorts of other applications. Two open source programmers, one in Texas and one in South Africa, have launched vole.cc, a distributed social network built on Sync. Last month, an engineer who works for Harvard University unveiled SyncNet, a parallel version of the world wide web that runs on Sync.
But a big part of the commercial opportunity for the tool, BitTorrent executives believe, lies in the reality that large corporations are aggressively reining in data following Snowden’s revelations. “It’s absolutely the largest companies in the world who are most worried about privacy and what is happening with their data, and products like Dropbox make no sense to a company like that,” Mason says.
The main concern of BitTorrent’s engineers, Klinker says, is keeping Sync secure. The system is designed to cryptographically ensure that no one can unlock a piece of data except for the person that owns it and the person it was shared with, known as a “secret.” Bram Cohen, who designed the original BitTorrent protocol, has been personally involved in reviewing these security considerations, according to Klinker. But the company has not open sourced the tool, so, unlike other distributed services, outsiders are unable to scour the code for vulnerabilities.
Klinker has argued, however, that sharing the code can also reveal vulnerabilities to attackers, and certainly, the company is appropriately paranoid about security. Asked if the NSA has made any overtures to retrieve data from Sync, Klinker thinks for a moment. “Not that we’re aware of,” he says.