Are Aether messages being sent in plain text?

I was reading the page and it’s clear that there is a model of security based on that is difficult to know who sent what.

What is not clear in the page is if the messages are being sent in plain text or encrypted.

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The connections between nodes are encrypted with TLS to prevent a passive third party listener from being able to eavesdrop on exactly what is transported. However, mind that all data in Aether is public, so this is primarily for transport security, to prevent what exactly is being transported at that moment.

For example, if this was not the case, and the node-to-node communication was in cleartext, a third party observer would very easily be able to pinpoint exactly which node created a particular post by listening to node-to-node communications as that post propagates through the network — the first ever occurrence of that post’s transmission would point out the origin node for that post. The TLS encryption we have in place prevents this.

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