Decoy messaging provides air cover and anonymity for whistleblowers

Mass decoy messaging between news agencies and readers can help protect the identity of whistleblowers, according to Dr. Manny Ahmed, the founder of CoverDrop, a whistleblower protection tool, and OpenOrigins, a blockchain firm that provides data provenance for images and videos to ensure authenticity. Both tools work in symbiosis to ensure trusted communications.

In an interview with Cointelegraph, Dr. Ahmed said that CoverDrop works by sending out large amounts of decoy encrypted messaging traffic between the readers of a news platform and the news platform itself.

This creates the illusion that every reader is a whistleblower, thus drowning out the identity of any true whistleblowers in a sea of digital noise. The executive outlined the problem whistleblowers currently face in the age of digital surveillance:

“Whistleblowers are in a tricky position because, by definition, they are part of a small set that has access to privileged information. So, even if they use end-to-end encryption, the fact that they have ever had communication with a journalist is enough to single them out.

It does not matter that they can’t see the contents of the message; just the one-on-one relationship is enough,” Dr. Ahmed continued.

The CoverDrop and OpenOrigins founder warned that advances in AI and data surveillance tools would only increase the threat to privacy and anonymity over time, creating a need for more robust defenses against the emerging panopticon of the security surveillance state.

Related: Vitalik introduces ‘pluralistic’ IDs to protect privacy in digital identity systems

The mass surveillance state supercharged: Agentic AI and the loss of anonymity in the crowd

Dr. Ahmed noted that mass data collection by governments and intelligence agencies has been ongoing for over a decade but largely ineffective because there was no efficient way to filter through the large quantities of data collected.

“They needed to hire thousands of analysts to sit down and actually target people; with AI you do not need to do that anymore,” the executive told Cointelegraph.

The rise of agentic AI allows intelligence agencies to assign an AI agent for each individual that would track all their data and provide a much more comprehensive profile of a person’s activity at a low computational cost, the executive warned.

“The threat has just escalated a lot. So, the defense has to escalate a lot as well,” Dr. Ahmed added.

Magazine: UK’s Orwellian AI murder prediction system, will AI take your job? AI Eye