What?

unPrism is a small computer that attaches to your TV and provides simple and secure communications with your friends and family (and a cheap media center into the bargain). The device is based on the new generation of single-board-computers like the the Raspberry Pi or the Odroid, and open source software¹.

unPrism gives you a pretty good level of personal privacy and is a way to resist Big Brother surveillance of the type revealed by Edward Snowden. It doesn’t attempt to hide you from criminal investigation or protect you from oppressive regimes².

Why?

We’re not drug dealers, we’re not terrorists³, and we have no big secrets to hide – but we wouldn’t let the local constabulary fit a webcam in our bedrooms either!

If you think that a democratic society should allow its citizens to go about their business quietly and privately (and if you don’t want to be anyone’s product in the process), then you want an unPrism. If you’re trying to stay at the front of a technological or scientific wave that your competitors in the US or UK or China might like to get a sneak preview of, then you want an unPrism. And if you just want a Raspberry Pi media center in a RetroModern enclosure with some privacy thrown in, then you want one too.

How?

A conjunction of technical factors and insights make unPrism feasible:

• cheap hardware (Raspberry Pi: a general purpose computer for £18)
• mature open source operating systems and crypto (communication protocols and filesystems) and proxies (like PageKite)
• you keep your wallet safe – and your swipe cards (bank cards, gym cards, library cards etc.) are a great source of easy-peasy passwords
• a physical device in a safe place (next to your TV, for example) can be very trustworthy; coupled with a safe way to authenticate with friends (your swipe cards, including out-of-date bank cards) can be used as a base for very secure communications

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1. Open source is widely acknowledged as the best model for secure software (see e.g. Schneier) and is now clearly the only viable model for avoiding NSA surveillance – “Closed-source software is easier for the NSA to backdoor than open-source software”. The Raspberry Pi runs open source software on the CPU, but has a proprietary blob running on its GPU.↩

2. For the latter, see projects like Tor, or LEAP, or a growing set of privacy software projects.↩

3. But won’t we be helping drug dealers and terrorists with our work? Well, yes, in the same way that building new roads helps bank robbers escape from the scene of the crime. Perhaps we should we have permanent road-blocks at every intersection?! What happens when the “security services” number millions of people, and when each and every one of them has access to all your movements and habits? In any case, Big Mafia and the like already use all the technology that unPrism uses, and need no help from minnows like us!↩