"I want to move away from the culture of associating encryption only with cryptocurrencies," she said. Chelsea Manning at the blockcrypto.com news site.
In a world where celebrities want more than half a million dollars for a jpeg of a cartoon monkey, Manning said the industry is "undoubtedly" overwhelmed with greed.
According to Manning, this resulted in a huge misunderstanding of the encryption by any critics, removing it from its roots that focus on privacy.
"Without cryptography, my whole life story could not have happened," he says. In 2010, Manning (before gender reassignment), then a U.S. Army soldier, used encrypted communications services to disclose confidential information at Julian Assange, which were later published on WikiLeaks.
Now, she is a member of the privacy startup Nym and works as a security analyst with a hardware optimization role. Switzerland-based Nym is a decentralized network which uses blockchain technology to mix and redirect packets of metadata (eg your IP address, who you talk to, when and where…).
Manning sees Nym as the ultimate successor to privacy technology, such as Tor Browser and VPN services.
Tor, however, has also been used as a way to hide information from criminals who wish to gain anonymous access to darkweb markets. Nym says it provides disincentives to stop such abuse of its services.
Nym mentions that only the nodes of the so-called mixnet will use a global network, but none of the data traffic will not be stored on the network itself.
Manning and her colleagues at Nym hope that his mixnet can serve as a platform on which applications can be built to create a privacy-focused Internet.
In doing so, they hope to promote an alternative to capitalist surveillance - a term coined by academic Shoshana Zuboff to describe the monitoring and commercialization of personal data shared on the Internet to make a profit for large technology companies.
