Episode 274 - Interview with Harry Halpin - CEO of NYM (Patreon)

Intro: The following is my interview with Harry Halpin, a research scientist from MIT, an anarchist, an activist and the CEO and co-founder of NYM Technologies. Nym is a new privacy tool that is trying to break global mass surveillance by rerouting your traffic through independent nodes and mixing it with noise to render traffic analysis unfeasible. This is very new and it will need its test of time, but it is a project I will be closely following. For this interview, I recorded my questions separately in post as I only had a microphone for Harry. My first question for Harry was: “what’s your why? What beliefs whether they be political, ideological, religious, or otherwise, do you hold, that guide you to focus on what you are doing right now?

8:51 How long has Harry Halpin been on this scene?

9:23 Have things improved or got worse over time?

14:44 How will regular people (non-techies) be persuaded to use something so advanced as Nym?

25:52 Have you thought about the fact that you are probably going to crash the business model of Facebook, of Google, Microsoft, you’re obviously going to crash the intelligence model of US, UK, all the other countries… are you prepared to fight these enemies? They are going to collude and coalesce to get you regulated out of existence, probably. They’re going to use every horrible accusation to vilify you, to portray you as defenders of terrorists and other criminals…

31:08 So blockchain is how all of this is gonna be funded?

34:46 So what is this mixnet thing?

41:30 How would the reward mechanism work for the node operator?

43:42 Do you think that this is going to interest people to do something like this?

44:02 is there this same danger as there is with running of the exit node for Tor?

46:01 You said this doesn’t work in China… why is that?

52:26 Are you optimistic things are going to get better?

52:53 So what do you see in the next few decades?