With some malice, the name “PrismCipher” was created as a retort to the specific NSA surveillance program made known by Snowden.

In a perfect world, once citizens have determined their government is spying on them, necessary course corrections would be made via elected officials. By now, it’s naive to think that’s ever gonna happen. In June 2013, Snowden disclosed a program begun in 2007. From then to now, the only thing that has improved is our awareness of it. (And the only thing that has increased is our general ambivalence.)

Since we can’t prevent the NSA from using PRISM to analyze and archive our data, we can use software like PrismCipher to render the NSA’s ill-gotten gains unintelligible.