I will explain one part of my work here. (This is just my story about what our trusted group does, and the other people who work on it might not agree with how I said everything.)

We give people letters from a trusted group to show that their keys are the keys that they should be. A person who gets one of these letters can put it on his or her computer. That computer can show it to other people's computers when they talk to the first computer. The other people's computers read the letters and check that the key that the computer is showing them is the same one that the letter says should be used. If so, they know they have a safe way of sending things in both directions. Then no one else can read or change those things.

Why is this needed? Because a state or another party (like the people who let your computer talk to the world) can say "I am the computer you wanted to talk to; use this key when you talk to me". Here, each key is a big number. Since a key is very hard to remember (and it's hard for a person to tell quickly by looking whether two keys are the same or not), a person couldn't know whether the key is the actual key from the real computer he or she wanted to talk to, or a made-up key from someone who wants to listen in. If you believe in the made-up key sent by such a person, you do have a "safe" way to talk, but the problem is that you're talking with the bad guy, not the real computer you meant to talk to. The bad guy could decide to talk to the real computer and show you what it says, so everything feels normal to you, but now what the real computer says isn't hidden from the bad guy, as it was supposed to be.

But, although people can make up their own keys when they want, people can't pretend to know a key that they don't actually know. And knowing what key someone wants you to use doesn't allow you to take that key for yourself. So, it's really important to have a way to know whether a key that you think you see is really used by the computer that you think it is. (Your computer can check this for you because of the letters written by trusted groups like ours. The computer will only tell you if what's in the letter doesn't match up.)

Our trusted group is different from many older ones because we don't try to make money by writing these letters. (Businesses give us money instead just because they want us to do this for everyone.)

We also have computers write all the letters without help from people, so they can do it very quickly and write a lot of them—and writing each letter is almost free for us. The computers can check for themselves whether what's in the letter (about what key to use) is right, because other computers show us that they control names and are allowed to have one of our letters. This way of doing things is not perfect because a state (or someone else) could still take away someone's computer's name because it doesn't like what that person is doing, or try to confuse us by changing things that are supposed to show who controls which name. We think we are doing things as well as other trusted groups do, though.

Our trusted group has been around for about two years and we think we have written more letters by now than any other trusted group. It makes people safer when they use computers because not as many other people have ways to know, control, or change what people are reading and writing with their computers.