Fate Acquired by Twitter Founded 2010 Parent organization Twitter Inc. | Founder Moxie Marlinspike Ceased operations November 28, 2011 | |
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Industry Encryption software, Mobile software, Mobile security Founders Moxie Marlinspike
Stuart Anderson Defunct November 28, 2011 (2011-11-28) Website www.whispersys.com
See Archived 17 January 2013 at the Wayback Machine. Headquarters San Francisco, California, United States | ||
Twitter acquires mobile security firm whisper systems
Whisper Systems was an enterprise mobile security company that was acquired by Twitter in November 2011. The company was co-founded by security researcher Moxie Marlinspike and roboticist Stuart Anderson in 2010. Some of Whisper Systems' software was made available under free software licenses after the acquisition, which led to the creation of Open Whisper Systems.
Contents
History
Security researcher Moxie Marlinspike and roboticist Stuart Anderson co-founded Whisper Systems in 2010. The company produced proprietary enterprise mobile security software. Among these were an encrypted texting program called TextSecure and an encrypted voice calling app called RedPhone. They also developed a firewall and tools for encrypting other forms of data.
On November 28, 2011, Whisper Systems announced that it had been acquired by Twitter. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed by either company. The acquisition was done "primarily so that Mr. Marlinspike could help the then-startup improve its security". Shortly after the acquisition, Whisper Systems' RedPhone service was made unavailable. Some criticized the removal, arguing that the software was "specifically targeted [to help] people under repressive regimes" and that it left people like the Egyptians in "a dangerous position" during the events of the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
Twitter released TextSecure as free and open-source software under the GPLv3 license in December 2011. RedPhone was also released under the same license in July 2012.
Marlinspike later left Twitter and founded Open Whisper Systems as a collaborative Open Source project for the continued development of TextSecure and RedPhone. As of May 2015, Open Whisper Systems consists of a large community of volunteer Open Source contributors, as well as a small team of dedicated grant-funded developers. In November 2015, Open Whisper Systems merged TextSecure with RedPhone and renamed it as Signal.
Products
Whisper Systems' products were all made for Android and included: