hile Moxie Marlinspike doesn't have the mainstream notoriety of Edward Snowden, the dreadlocked, free-spirited coder and cryptographer is one of the most important individuals working within today's global tech community (and certainly the only one with as mellifluous a pseudonym).

Marlinspike is the founder of Open Whisper Systems, a non-profit software group, and the designer of Signal, an open-source platform for encrypted voice and text communication [that has garnered praise by everyone from Snowden to filmmaker Laura Poitras and prominent cryptographers Bruce Schneier and Matthew Green.

While Marlinspike has admirers throughout the encryption community, law enforcement figures like FBI director James Comey have issued dire warnings about the ability to communicate beyond the reach of eavesdropping. Last month, the FBI abruptly walked away from its high-profile case in which it tried to compel Apple to defeat its own iPhone security measures, but only after a third-party provided the means to hack into the work phone of the dead San Bernardino terrorist Syed Farook.

But the hallmark that has made Signal so popular is "end-to-end encryption" — with cryptographic keys housed only on the devices of the sender and recipient. This means that the company servers act merely as go-betweens that cannot decrypt the contents of messages passed along, even if served with a warrant.