Unseen.is

» see unseen.is as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Unseen sold two things, and software was only one of them. The other was a map. Its homepage asked "Why Iceland?" and answered its own question with a line about a pure land in the pristine North Atlantic, sitting between the United States and Europe and belonging to neither. In the autumn of 2013 that was a product. Lavabit had closed in August rather than hand over its keys, every week brought another Snowden document, and a mailbox outside American jurisdiction was something people would pay for on the strength of the address alone.

The company was Unseen ehf, registered in Reykjavik, with Chris Kitze as chief executive from September 2012. The service went up properly in October 2013 and the technology press found it the following February. You got chat and calling for free, with encrypted mail behind a paid tier, and the specification sheet was unusually loud: 4096-bit keys and a lattice-based NTRU key exchange, which the company said made the whole arrangement resistant to a quantum computer that did not yet exist.

Reviewers who tried to check any of it ran into the same wall. The code was closed, the encryption was the company's own, and nothing about it could be independently verified. The free accounts, which were the ones most people had, turned out not to carry end-to-end encryption at all, something the marketing language did very little to make clear. By 2014 there were long public write-ups arguing that nobody should trust the service, and by the later years the reviews had stopped being about cryptography and started being about users who had lost access to their mail and could not get a human to answer.

~ the dossier ~

~ what iceland was for ~

Iceland after the 2008 crash had decided to be a jurisdiction. The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative passed in 2010 as a parliamentary resolution, with the stated intention of making the country the safest place on earth to host inconvenient information, and for a few years every privacy startup on the internet seemed to have a Reykjavik address in its footer. The power was cheap and the legal story was already written.

What that story could not do was make the engineering true. Jurisdiction protects you from a subpoena, not from a key exchange you designed yourself and will not show anyone. Unseen was the clearest case of a service selling the map instead of the machine, and the customers who cared most about the difference were precisely the ones least able to check it.

~ the last eleven days ~

I was never shopping for a mailbox on these terms. I had a webmail account from whichever provider the TTNet line came with, like almost everyone in Ankara, and choosing an inbox by the legal regime of the country hosting it belonged to a conversation happening in English, in forums, somewhere else. The threat model was real for the people who had one. Mine was a phone company and a monthly bill.

The ending had been visible for two years before it arrived. The final version of the homepage still carried an upgrade notice dated May 2018, an apology for email being down for some users, a note about chat being under attack from China, and a version string reading 3.8.4 from August 2018. Nothing on the page had moved since. Service from Iceland ended on 31 October 2020, with users told to archive whatever they wanted to keep because no copies would be retained and the disks were to be destroyed. The site answered for eleven more days and the crawlers recorded it for the last time on 11 November 2020. Chat was supposed to carry on from a United States host at unseen.tw. Neither address resolves now.

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