When corporations and strangers can map together a picture of your life based on what data is available online, there’s bound to be repercussions. Your data is at risk and for those who care about privacy, like Linus, the solution is ‘Encrypt now. Encrypt everything.’
The man on a mission
You could call Linus Chang an idealist and a perfectionist. It was clear, when as an 8-year-old with an Apple IIc computer as his best friend, that a lifetime of tinkering with a keyboard was ahead. ‘I was destined to have a career in IT and software.’ explains Linus. ‘I love solving problems. I love creating products.’ This would not surprise anyone who knows Linus. He thinks differently, coming at problems from an alternative angle to most, and unabashedly questions everything.
As the Founder of Scram Software, he manages a team of people, forever searching for the best of the best to join his team. He does not settle for the status quo, always pushing himself and others to do better. The perfectionist.
Scram was born out of a personal need: a love for the cloud and the convenience of accessible data, but a desire for privacy. ‘I love using the cloud but am privacy conscious and I don’t want personal data leaked out. I want my data safe from both hackers and cloud providers. I started Scram when I couldn’t find products that I wanted to use’.
Back in 2001, Linus ventured into entrepreneurship after just two years as an employee. He had already learnt what made him tick: creating software, getting it into the hands of users, and watching their reactions. ‘Being able to create something that someone actually used was incredible.’ Linus made the jump into entrepreneurship aged 23, starting his first company (which is still running today). And 13 years later, seeing new emerging needs in the world, he started Scram.
Why this desire to do his own thing? ‘Maybe it’s ego? I saw myself as capable of doing more. I have a fiercely independent streak, I don’t want to be a cog in someone else’s machine. I believe in creating your own future… which is sometimes more than you ask for!’
Saying ‘Scram!’ to Big Brother
As with so many good entrepreneurs, the motivation is genuine. Linus has experienced a privacy breach first-hand, having had information twisted and used against him in a legal case. ‘This caused me a huge amount of distress. But my desire for privacy doesn’t end there. I’m conscious of Google running machine learning on data or search history and selling that info to insurance companies, to be used against you to their gain’.
He sees the problem as only getting worse. ‘Once you start automating, once you incorporate machine-learning, you remove human discernment, which should never be discounted when it comes to privacy’. Privacy is dead, says Zuckerberg. It’s to Zuck and his Big Brother-esque mates that Linus is saying ‘Scram!’. Ultimately, for Linus, it’s about personal freedom. ‘Why can’t I upload a backup of my tax returns to Google Drive without Google knowing my income?’.
Nothing good is built on mediocrity
‘At first I wanted to build it myself’, says Linus, ‘but because cryptography is so complicated, it was necessary to build the right team to tackle the challenge.’ The Scram team includes several world-class cryptographers, but the challenge to find good developers is real. Linus’ philosophy? ‘You can’t build a company on mediocrity’. He tirelessly seeks those who are outstanding, uniting under a common vision, and delivering to a premium standard.
Exposing Scram to the industry
Scram had been in existence for four years before entering CyRise. Linus had a vision from the start, but was eager to understand if it was possible to solve problems at a bigger scale. Not just solving privacy issues, but data security issues. Data breaches continue to affect citizens worldwide. Health, financial, and even photo databases, continuously being compromised. ‘Access level controls get breached frequently and no one was protecting the data. 96% of stolen data is unencrypted. It’s a global problem. CyRise is enabling me to open this conversation to the wider community. I get to explore how we can make encryption a bigger part of the world’. The goal is to have an impact on the individual. ‘The only way you can do that is by helping the enterprise. They’re the ones with the databases being breached.’
Continued learning
Over the last few months, Linus has learned that Scram wasn’t really solving a burning problem that the CISO had. Despite the global epidemic of breaches, an ‘encrypt everywhere’ approach wasn’t high on their list; and conversely for the problems that were high on their list, Scram didn’t have the solution. Universal encryption was not included in the ASD’s essential eight. Thus, Linus’ cry for ‘fail safe security’ or ‘security by design’ was a nice-to-have, but not a necessity.
It’s at this point that Linus has pivoted back towards his sweet-spot as the individualist who empowers individuals. A grassroots approach. He’s appealing to people who care about privacy as much as he does; who unite under the fear of what a privacy-less future looks like, and who fight tirelessly to protect against the freedom of the individual.
‘It’s about making cryptography easy and accessible to the average person. If you are concerned about privacy, now or in the future, you would want to encrypt everything. If it was easy, you’d just do it. It’d be second nature’.
Privacy shouldn’t be a privilege
‘I’m not someone else’s object to make profit off. And neither is anyone else’. For this individualist, it’s about true privacy for all humans. What does this mean for what Linus is building, or will build in the future? ‘If I think I can do it, I’ll back myself. I’m the sort of person who will take action and create something from nothing. And I don’t really care what other people think. I think that’s a necessary approach for an entrepreneur. If I worried about what other people think about me, then that would sap my mental energy. I would rather focus that energy on building and creating’.
Independence. Autonomy. Wonderfully unique. This is Linus. And this is what he wants to foster in others. For those who want to take control for themselves.
