Max Hillebrand credits his mother for his journey into the freedom space. Her free spirit helped Max understand the value of helping others from a young age. Joining the workforce early sparked a curiosity in economics, which would set Max on the road to becoming one of Europe’s key privacy advocates and FOSS project managers.

While most cypherpunks conclude that free, open-source privacy-preserving tools must be built to protect our freedoms through a love for code, Austrian economics proved the jumping-off point for Hillebrand.

After reading For a New Liberty by Murray Rothbard, Hillebrand became certain of why freedom is not just important, but why it is the logical conclusion of human affairs.

“A friend helped me to install Ubuntu as my first Linux operating system. And I then really was wondering why I didn’t have to pay for this software.”

Hillebrand recommends Stefan Kinsella's book Against Intellectual Property as a definitive argument for the free software movement from the Austrian economics tradition.

“Once I understood that combination of Austrian economics and cypherpunk free software,” he says, “that's when I really understood the value proposition of Bitcoin, and that changed everything. Since then, I made it my mission to build free and open source software that is designed specifically to increase the amount of freedom in people's lives.”

What does freedom actually mean?

In the 1970s, pseudonymous writer Rayo created the philosophy of Vonu, meaning ‘voluntary, not vulnerable.’ Hillebrand subscribes to Rayo’s metric of success for freedom.

Specifically, he called it the ‘mean time to harassment’. Or in other words, ‘when was the last time that you were stolen from?’ The longer this number or the larger this time frame, the freer you are. This could be the last time you were punched in the face, the last time someone stole your watch, when taxes were last levied against you, or when you last asked permission to drive a car or register a vehicle.

Hillebrand contends that this shows us that most people aren't really that free. We have to ask for permission all the time. Well, we have to pay taxes all the time. Basically, every purchase that you make has at least a value-added tax on top.

He continues, “Bitcoin is a beautiful increase in your mean time to harassment. If you run a full node, then you are no longer susceptible to the changes of monetary policy from politicians. The inflation of the US dollar no longer affects you if you are using a money that simply doesn't have an inflation.”

Using cryptography to ensure no one can steal from you or harass you through surveillance became a key focus for Hillebrand’s work (Wasabi Wallet, ZkSNACKs, Sound Money Solutions).

When asked about his work on the new decentralized, encrypted group chat app, Hillebrand shared the story behind the name White Noise.

“Static is a kind of chaotic neutral. You’d see it on your television in the old days, those black and white pixels. Then you just hear a noise, something that's incomprehensible to the human ear. That's basically what cryptography does. It takes a message that you and I can read, but it garbles it in such a way that people other than you and me get no information. Zero.”

Is Privacy Under Attack?

Privacy is the ability to selectively reveal yourself to the world, or, in other words, privacy means that you can choose what to say and to whom you say that.

Hillebrand believes that privacy is a core tenet of the human experience. “I don't think that privacy is a right or just a fact of nature. It's how the universe is organized,” he says.

As for whether people try to prevent you from having the choice of what to say to whom, the answer is yes. Hillebrand explains that when you intend to send a message only to one person, three-letter agencies can just scoop it up and store those messages for later analysis on a scale that is absolutely unfathomable. We're talking about terabytes of data per person.

This is not the kind of coercive surveillance where others hack into your computer and get the data out. Where it gets a bit more pernicious, he says, is with the voluntary revelation of too much information.

Hillebrand cites the example of how, during pre-surveillance capitalism on the web, a 12-year-old kid from India could talk to a gray-beard wizard in San Francisco to design revolutionary new protocols. But Web 2.0, specifically Facebook, changed matters.

Facebook profiles normalized using your real name for your profile, as well as sharing your location, images, and even more sensitive information about your social graph. Sharing a large amount of data publicly became the standard mechanism for those looking for jobs or new social interactions. Now, they’ve become so normalized that employers and new social contacts expect access to your background and personal data. And the profitability of this extractive approach has meant Big Tech has not been incentivized to create alternatives that preserve privacy.

“Building software is hard enough,” explains Hillebrand. “But building software that doesn't spy on users, that doesn't steal from users, that doesn't trick users, that's a next-level effort.”

Yet, he remains hopeful because now we have more tools and technologies that help us with creating new, more secure alternatives — Bitcoin, torrents, Tor, and master encryption.

The more important shift, Hillebrand contends, is for more people to be conscious about their lack of privacy. If you can question whether you really need to share certain information, you can start your privacy journey.

“With this type of mindset, you can go through all of the technologies that you use, scroll through your phone, and see the apps that are installed. You can replace your entire stack of tools with something that is more secure, more private, and more freedom-preserving — encrypted email, VPNs, GrapheneOS, and even Organic Maps.”

The Value of Parallel

The value proposition of the FOSS projects Hillebrand runs are parallel options. White Noise is not designed to replace Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp, he says. Even if just a few individuals use it at first, it is still worth pursuing these goals.

The solution to collectivist punishment is to have two realms. The first is the totalitarian realm of politics, of violence, of coercion, of theft, of intimidation, and we have the second realm of view of free interactions, voluntary choices, collaboration, and production. It is always possible to have one foot in each of these realms.

“You can show up at the party meeting yourself and cheer and clap and sing the hymns. But then, at night, you meet with your friends in the basement. And, you drink the liquor that was made illegal. And you teach your kids about reason and about poetry and the beautiful aspects of life.”

What we need, he says, is to have the tools available and to make sure that the people who do want to have at least parts of their life not surveilled, at least parts of their lives protected, can thrive.

White Noise as a Parallel Space

Most people would claim to have nothing to hide. But what about sharing pictures of your children? You could control access by sending them in an encrypted chat group to your family. Other people and mega-corporations don’t need access.

And what about our work? We oftentimes need to, you know, talk about details of a strategy, for example, how do we announce our new product to the world? And, of course, an announcement strategy should be kept private.

Keeping sensitive information private (e.g., legal or health data) is also important. These are just some of the many reasons we built a parallel tool with White Noise. And of course, these tools should be open source with closed channels to report possible compromises or bugs.

Eventually, I see more people finding apps like White Noise. I think the best marketing agencies of Freedom Tech are actually the thieves. If someone steals from you or if the government becomes tyrannical, then you will be looking for solutions.

Next Steps

The most exciting part of the White Noise project for Hillebrand is not the capabilities of the app itself; it is the Marmot protocol, which underpins the tech.

“White Noise is the first application to really go deep in this protocol and stack, but there are already many, like tens of other apps and projects that are highly interested in adding this type of encryption and message delivery to their own application.”

Hillebrand cites Tubester as one example of an app vibe-coded in a single weekend that is working on the Marmot protocol. Tubester is basically a YouTube for kids to create and share video content safely. Obviously, parents would be concerned if any random stranger on the Internet could see the videos of their kids and start messaging them. Marmot’s strong encryption means users can share videos with the intended recipients only.

In the future, other Nostr applications like Primal, like Amethyst, like Damos, and others are actively researching how they can add Marmot into their own stack.

“Interoperability and the tooling of a parallel space has never been possible before,” Hillebrand concludes. “I don't care that much about White Noise, but I very much care about having a secure messaging environment or content sharing environment on the Nostr protocol at large. I think others will care too.”

Interview by:

Philip Charter is a totally human author , editor, and writer for leaders and companies in the freedom tech space. He successfully escaped the bad British weather and now lives in Gran Canaria, Spain.