BitTorrent was best known as an internet protocol
that let people swap pirated movies and music at the expense of big
Hollywood studios and record labels. But 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.
BitTorrent Inc. CEO Eric Klinker. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED
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.
Erik
Pounds, VP of Product Management for BitTorrent Sync; Matt Mason, VP of
Marketing, BitTorrent, Inc.; and Lou Hong, Product Marketing Manager,
BitTorrent Sync. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED
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.
BitTorrent employees in the BitTorrent Sync “war room.” Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED
Ryan Tate is a WIRED senior writer and the author of "The 20% Doctrine: How Tinkering, Goofing Off, and Breaking the Rules Drive Success in Business" (HarperBusiness 2012). His PGP fingerprint is C8B5 6AEC 1DB6 C532 7F48 3446 FEA5 DD4E B13D EAC3. Email: ryan_tate@wired.com
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