Plaintext for Journalists
A mobile keyboard that turns your real message into innocent-sounding cover text for any chat app, so you can message sources safely without anyone reading your DMs knowing.
journalists, fixers, and human-rights workers communicating with confidential sources in restrictive environments
- Type your real message in a private scratchpad; the app generates a cover text you paste into WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal
- Decoder mode that pulls a pasted cover text back into the real message on the recipient side, with no shared servers
- Per-contact shared-secret phrases so each conversation uses a different 'language' the system auto-detects
- Plausible-cover-text style sliders (casual, professional, family-chat) so the cover matches who you're talking to
The 506-star GitHub repo proves the underlying tech (LLM steganography in conversation) is now viable and the project creator cites government message-scanning as a direct concern — there's a clear ethical-comms use case.
GitHub repo sits at ~1.1k stars (above cited 506) and the Guardian launched a competing 'Secure Messaging' whistleblower tool with Cambridge in June 2025, proving real newsroom interest — but the actual addressable audience of journalists/fixers running live covert chats via mobile keyboards is narrow.GitHub - nethical6/conversation-steganography ↗The Guardian launches Secure Messaging, a world-first from a media organisation ↗
No direct mobile-keyboard LLM-steganography competitor exists, but the open-source Conversation Stenography repo (GPL-3.0) is trivially forkable, StealthText targets the same privacy/stego niche on mobile, and SecureDrop/Signal already cover most journalist threat models.GitHub - velmuruganui/stealthtext ↗Securing Whistleblowing in the Digital Age: SecureDrop and the Changing Landscape of Journalistic Practices for Source Protection ↗
Target users are journalists, fixers, and HR workers — predominantly price-sensitive (NGOs, freelancers, small newsrooms). SecureDrop and the Conversation Stenography repo are free, and news orgs usually build in-house or via grants; Play Store stego apps monetize poorly with low downloads (Steganography app ~10k+).Steganography APK - Free Download for Android ↗The Guardian launches Secure Messaging ↗
Government message-scanning pressure is a durable, growing trend making the need real long-term, but the README itself warns that LLM-stego detection techniques are already being developed — an arms-race that could shorten the useful life of any specific implementation.GitHub - nethical6/conversation-steganography ↗The Steganographic Potentials of Language Models ↗
Highly non-trivial: iOS/Android keyboard extensions are heavily sandboxed (no network in many configs, limited memory, can't run arbitrary processes), and the underlying tool requires on-device LLM inference (GPT-2-class) to generate cover text in real time per keystroke — latency, model size, and OS restrictions make a polished cross-platform keyboard a major engineering lift.GitHub - nethical6/conversation-steganography ↗