 |
| Edward Snowden with the Guardian's editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger (right) and senior reporter Ewen MacAskill (left) in Moscow. Photograph: Alex Healey for the Guardian |
On Thursday,
the Guardian released the first video excerpts from its exclusive interview with former NSA
contractor Edward Snowden, who has garnered an enormous media following but has
so far agreed to talk publicly to only a small handful of news organizations (His
first and only interview for an American television audience, with NBC Nightly
News anchor Brian Williams, was broadcasted on May 28.). In the Guardian interview, Snowden cited
the concept of a “zero-knowledge” privacy environment as a model for cloud
computing, and endorsed BOCA’s client SpiderOak as a prime example of this privacy-first model. The widely publicized
interview led to a flurry of interest from other high-level media influencers
and customers wanting to learn more about SpiderOak and its platform.
The topic
arose when the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, asked about the
future of cloud computing and Snowden responded, “What cloud companies need to
pursue in order to be truly successful is called a zero-knowledge system.” When
asked for an example of this, Snowden cited SpiderOak: “There’s a company
called SpiderOak,” he said, “[that] has structured their system in such a way
that you can store all of your information on them but they literally have no
access to the content of that information. So that yeah, while they could be
compelled to turn it over, the law enforcement agencies still have to go to a
judge to get a warrant to get that encryption key from you.”
The
resulting deluge of coverage, in publications ranging from Gigaom
to the Wall Street Journal, has raised SpiderOak’s visibility to
unprecedented heights, along with generating a high volume of incoming leads,
and BOCA is extremely proud to have helped SpiderOak reach this publicity
breakthrough. While it only takes one high-profile interview to bring a client
to a new level of recognition, BOCA and SpiderOak have worked together for
years to lay the proper groundwork for this moment. It began when BOCA sat down
with SpiderOak to develop the idea of a “Zero Knowledge Privacy Standard” in
2011, leveraging the company’s unique approach to protecting customer data to
make its offering stand out from the rest of the crowd. When revelations of NSA
spying led to a spike in interest in privacy-first technologies in 2013, BOCA
had already done the heavy lifting to make SpiderOak the first name in any
discussion of “zero-knowledge privacy,” a term coined by BOCA and SpiderOak during
our initial messaging brainstorm in 2011.
There has
been a rising drumbeat of coverage for SpiderOak over the past few years,
including features in the New York Times and TechCrunch, but Snowden’s specific endorsement of the “zero-knowledge
privacy” model in the Guardian interview, and his reference to SpiderOak as the
best example of this technology, raised the company to a new level. Since
Thursday, SpiderOak has been written about by nearly every major technology and
business publication, along with many top tier general news and political
outlets as well (check out the impressive summary of SpiderOak’s press coverage
here), and continues to field interview requests
at an overwhelming rate. SpiderOak has also seen an enormous surge in interest
from potential new customers – website traffic spiked in the following days and
the company experienced five
to six times higher signup rates. While the full impact to SpiderOak’s
bottom line has yet to be seen, the upside so far looks tremendous.
