A personal manifesto on privacy, filmmaking, and code.
My name is Troy Manning. For the last 14 years, I've been a filmmaker, shooting in over 17 countries. I've filmed interviews with people who were risking their lives to tell their stories. I've handled corporate footage that, if leaked, could tank a stock price.
And for years, I had a problem: transcription.
Every time I needed a transcript, I had to upload my footage to a cloud service. I watched the progress bar, knowing that my data was leaving my control. It was being stored on a server I didn't own, potentially analyzed by algorithms I didn't understand, and subject to terms of service that changed on a whim.
In her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff warns about the commodification of our personal experiences. Every upload is a data point. I realized that by using these tools, I was feeding the very machine I often critiqued.
I decided to build the tool I wanted to use. I'm also a developer, so I looked into the capabilities of Apple's new Silicon chips. The Neural Engine in the M1 and M2 chips is a beast. It's capable of running heavy machine learning models locally.
Using WhisperKit and CoreML, I built CipherScript with one non-negotiable rule: Zero Network Entitlements.
This isn't just a marketing slogan. In the app's code signature, I deliberately omitted the entitlement that allows network access. If CipherScript tried to connect to the internet, macOS would block it at the kernel level.
This means:
CipherScript is $10. You pay once, and you own it forever. It's a return to the old way of buying software: a fair exchange of value for a tool that works for you, not the other way around.
Whether you're a filmmaker, a lawyer, or just someone who values their privacy, I hope CipherScript gives you a little bit of that sovereignty back.