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How the Hong Kong Protests Forced Firechat to Evolve

Upgrading from Burning Man to civil unrest.

Open Garden, the tech company behind FireChat, a popular peer-to-peer messaging app that uses bluetooth and wifi signals, never saw their app as a protest tool. But things changed as civil unrest unfolded in Hong Kong this September over Chinese meddling in elections, with organizers instructing protesters to use FireChat as a pre-emptive measure against possible cell tower shutdown.

Suddenly, an app designed with music festival-goers in mind, and tested at Burning Man, became a hot digital commodity with over 100,000 downloads. Between September 26th and 29, there were two million chat sessions in FireChat in Hong Kong alone. To put that into perspective, there were 1.3 million tweets with the Occupy Central hashtag worldwide during the same time period.

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While using the peer-to-peer network allowed protesters to message off-the grid across distances of up to 200 feet, all communications were public, and its users were unauthenticated. This left Firechat users wide open to potential monitoring and manipulation by Chinese authorities.

Related: BitTorrent's P2P Encrypted Messaging App Is Now Available

Open Garden's Chief Marketing Officer Christophe Daligault warned of this vulnerability back in May when Iranians began using FireChat to circumvent a state WhatsApp shutdown. Apparently, the many mobile device users, among them protestors and journalists covering the revolution in Hong Kong, didn't hear Dalignault. If they had, they would have used encrypted messaging platforms like TextSecure, Threema, and Cyphr, an app developed by Switzerland-based Golden Frog, whose VyprVPN can vault the Great Firewall of China.

When Open Garden CEO Micha Benoliel saw reports of protesters using FireChat while on layover in Bangalore, he ditched his plans to return to San Francisco, and headed to Hong Kong instead, where he spent most of his time on the OccupyCentral grounds.

Hong Kong protesters told Benoliel that they wanted trusted voices on FireChat. This on-the-ground information gathering, combined with email suggestions coming out of Hong Kong, convinced Open Garden to fast-track its plans to introduce user authentication. As Daligault explained to me, users will be verified with a distinctive mark on their profile and in every message they send.

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"The purpose is to bring trusted voices to FireChat, as most people use pseudonyms," Daligault said. "When people use pseudonyms, it's hard to know who to trust. Verified accounts is a way to introduce trusted voices."

Open Garden believes FireChat's verified names will be useful for journalists, educators, and community leaders hoping to address a very large audience at once, but also have real-time discussions, which can't be done with more common protest tools like Facebook and Twitter.

"Amongst the first participants is Patrick Boehler, reporter at the South China Morning Post, and journalism instructor at the University of Hong Kong," said Daligault.

The FireChat CMO also said that Open Garden is working on private messaging features. However, he cautioned that it will take some time—months not weeks—because making off-the-grid private messaging work is no easy task.

Aside from learning that protesters need user authentication and private messaging, Daligault said Open Garden realized FireChat is well-suited for people working to achieve a common goal. For instance, they hadn't anticipated that Hong Kong students would use FireChat to type messages like "I need water bottles right now," and get near-instantaneous replies.

Thousands of demonstrators protest during Hong Kong's 'umbrella revolution.' Image: Pasu Au Yeung/Flickr

"We saw the same phenomenon on a much smaller scale when burners were heading out to Burning Man," Daligault said. After creating a public chatroom for Burning Man, 4,000 people joined, and when police closed access to Black Rock City, leaving some stranded, the community erupted online with help.

"So we saw the news come up on FireChat four minutes before the first tweet," he added. "About 43 minutes later @burningman sent their [first] tweet. During these 43 minutes burners had already been helping each other with tips, info on hotel availability, while also making plans for parties in Reno and elsewhere."

Combined with the Hong Kong protests, it became clear to Open Garden that there is a very real utility for off-the-grid communication tools with exclusive networking capabilities. And with the off-the-grid GoTenna device on the way this fall, this type of communication is likely to become more commonplace, whether users are festival-goers, adventurers in remote parts of the world, or protestors and revolutionaries in areas of civil unrest.

But, for many users, privacy is still paramount. Even Facebook, with its plans for a new anonymous messaging app, is coming around to the idea of privacy. While secure messaging apps might be facing some exhaustion in the public imagination, the technology is steadily entering the mainstream.

If Open Garden can can deliver on FireChat's private messaging, and do it in encrypted fashion like TextSecure, Threema, and Cyphr, then they will have a very powerful messaging tool indeed. One worthy of protest movements.