History

In August of 2009, I began to realize that people no longer had any private channels for communication. Essentially, the 4th Amendment to the Constitution had died incrementally in America. That Amendment reads,

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

In the 1990s the "War On Drugs" in America rang a death knell for the 4th with judiciary allowing wide berth of unwarranted property seizure. In 2001 the USA Patriot Act with its "Sneek & Peek" and other provisions closed the coffin on the 4th. The generalized spying without warrants has nailed the coffin shut, all the while with the mainstream media and general public in denial.

The average American citizen reacts uniformly by asserting that he or she has nothing to keep confidential from the government watchers. It does not occur to her/him that tyranny has come to roost now in an America hypnotized by its own former success and preeminence in the world. From ongoing processes of deindustrialization and widespread pauperization of citizens will likely flow an ever increasing tyranny in the formerly free republic. The resulting push for total government knowledge of citizens personal habits, business dealings, and medical and psychological history has already become a preeminent feature of our current modern western culture.

So in an environment of rapid, complete encroachment of an individual's right to privacy (where there is general denial that such a process is happening, or is important), or that there even needs to be a right to privacy, I have written a small computer program that should ensure you a basic level of privacy on the internet. You may achieve a private communication with anyone that you personally meet, though you must deem the person worthy of the effort at the time of your meeting him/her. Hence the program name: Hand-Shake-Privacy. Your communications can once again be private from prying government and corporate eyes, and only readable by these outsiders by issuing a subpoena or search warrant. This program was written to empower the individual, and to disempower the collective. In this case the individual citizen is empowered to have private correspondence with his associates again, which is his civil right. The collective is disempowered from scrutinizing said communication without a search warrant, which is to say they are prevented from the practice of illegally scrutinizing private correspondence without probable cause.

About the Software

Though new to the field of cryptography, after perusing Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier, I concluded combining a one-time pad with simple steganography would provide an impenetrable system under ideal conditions. So I wrote this program in prototype form in the hope that after you start using it, you will alter and improve it. Under GNU license I have provided my source code in C++. The program was written from a procedural point-of-view, and is not dependent on any subordinate objects, commercial or otherwise. A couple of subroutines, newByte and altByte , visible and built into the program source-code, do all the real work with the text and photograph bit manipulation.

The program currently has been alpha-tested on Windows XP and Vista. I would welcome any test on Windows 7 and all feedback from any OS. I am currently hoping to prepare execution modules of HSP program to run on Linux and Mac operating systems. Of course I would welcome any organized group of programmers who would like to take this program to the next level under the GNU-gpl.

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At this time this program is executable using Microsoft® operating systems