Theoretically, it’s possible to maintain privacy even if transmission is public. Look at SSL for example. So if you send messages in encrypted form, and you decrypt upon receipt, you can have privacy. Addressing is also possible as long as you’re fine with addresses themselves being public.
That would be amazing. If the secure transmissions are possible, I know of some organizations that would love to have that sort of technology because of how much it can expand their current technology, and they in turn could provide funding to reach that goal and any others along the way (i.e. distribution of information). Would this be something your team would be interested in?
We’re already planning to introduce one-way messaging with privacy using encryption and simple addressing scheme, with publicly accessible API. The primary use case is for people who occasionally have Internet access, but still need to receive messages in environments where Internet is not accessible. The system would require a one-time exchange of keys so that messages can be decrypted on the other end, and exchange of keys happens off Outernet for obvious reasons.
What about two-way secure communication? Is that a foreseeable goal moving forward?
Generally speaking, I’m not psychic. 
Haha understood, correct me if I’m wrong, but if there’s a way to do one way private communication with SSL, there is (or could be easily created) a way to respond and create two-way communication between two users.
I just want to get my facts straight because I have some great ideas for where this could go that I would like to share with your team and I want to be a part of this amazing project as much as I can.
I never said we’d use SSL, though. We’ll probably use gnuPG, and recipient would need to possess the public key in order to read the messages.
Oh okay, so gnuPG would entail using the public key to encrypt one session key per use to secure communications, right? I’ve really only heard of gnuPG,so how does sending messages work, is the public key also used for sending? If I’m not mistaken, then I think through use of digital signatures that two-way private communication would still be possible, even though at first it might not be real-time.
Yes, very well could be. The only problem is it would be broadcast for anyone to download and try and crack if they wanted to. Which would probably be pretty easy for anybody with a multimillion dollar budget. 
Basically, you have a private-public key pair. You encrypt the message with private key, which can then be decrypted with public key. It’s nothing Outernet-specific, mind you, that’s how asymmetric encryption works in general, so we’re just using it the old-school way.
Probably.
Amazing! I’ll be sending a PM to you, Syed, and Ben concerning my broad visions for this project since you three seem to be some of the most integral and receptive people (at least from what I’ve gathered on the forums and project information).
There is also the Dynamic Public/Private key also where even if you use the same password the hash it returns is completely different from the other. This is what most/all major company’s use but if you can get that server based Central key ( aka heartbleed) then you can decrypt any of the private keys with much ease rather then do it from scratch which can take anywhere from 20-50 years of constant computer power on the typical user computer unless you have a billion dollar super cluster ( PS3 Linux cluster ftw )