> The motivations that led to end-to-end encryption going mainstream lie far out on the political fringe. The original impetus for Marlinspike’s entry into cryptography, around 2007, was to challenge existing power structures, particularly the injustice of how (as he put it) “Internet insecurity is used by people I don’t like against people I do: the government against the people.” But sticking to anarchism would imply an almost certain defeat.
What a reflection of the massive political shift from individual liberty and 'all men are created equal', for which privacy is necessary, to compliance with power. Now that's "far out on the political fringe" and even "anarchy"?
I know most people don't think philosophically about it, but Signal's principles are pretty mainstream American (and probably other free countries), afaik - or knew?
EDIT:
> Signal has managed to maintain an unusual focus on the autonomy of the individual, a wariness of state authority, and an aversion to making money, characteristics that are recognizably anarchist.
Doesn't that describe, to different degrees, a great many open source projects? Mozilla? BSDs? etc?
EDIT2:
I think that's what the article really is about: The author's theory that this sort of vision is utopian, very fringe, and therefore impossible.
It's pretty shocking to see it in Wired, which once led in exploring, beliving in, and bringing to the world's (or its readers') attention exceptional innovations well beyond the conceptions of the norm.
Now they doubt such things ipso facto. Nobody seems to remark on the extraordinary reactionary philosophy that is flooding the public space, the antithisis of creativity, freedom, innovation, and 'intellectual curiosity'.
> Doesn't that describe, to different degrees, a great many open source projects? Mozilla? BSDs? etc?
Or a lot of englightenment political theory about democracy and republicanism and the rule of law that all lie at the roots of most modern states?
It's one thing to meet with refutation of this philosophy. It's another thing to meet with the wired article author's incredulity & astonishment at these well established ideas.
Not to be Debbie downer but there’s been a cultural shift in the liberal establishment over the years away from protecting speech, even hateful speech to actively espousing and advocating for censorship. It’s clear that principles can shift over time and Wired is toeing the line.
It's a problem across the spectrum. "Don't say gay" and the whole book banning business across the US come to mind. Is there legislation anywhere implementing "left wing censorship"?
That was about introducing sex ed to third graders. Have third graders put down their toy cars, dolls and blocks yet? And then you have a Cal governor suinf a school dist demanding they teach the curriculum he believes is correct. So you have an example of two governors, one on each side, tellig districts what to teach
But, the thing is, liberals _used_ _to_ espouse free speech as long as it was legal and defended it to the death, so to speak. Conservatives, well, they were conservative and were more on the "decency" argument but today that is reversed and the liberals are tending more autocratic than the conservatives.
That may have been the intent (which I seriously doubt) but in practice it means teachers cannot even mention their same sex partners or even that gay/trans people exist because that could be considered “sex ex” by a parent who doesn’t want their children to know gay people exist (and for the record it is not sex ed)
That bill would penalize the teacher if their gay significant other brought their forgotten lunch to school, the kids asked "who was that", and the teacher attempted any answer.
It has nothing to do with sex. Republicans in florida have quite clearly criminalized same sex couples doing normal things.
YES. I don't any teachers to mention anything that isn't part of my child's direct education. How is this so difficult to understand? Go talk to an adult.
The children are not the teachers friends. Leave them alone.
I don't care who their partner is, neither does my child. No one cares. Maybe we should ask why government employees aren't keeping stronger boundries when around children?
Also... Seriously? You aren't fooling anyone with these absolutely convoluted hypotheticals. No one is going to jail for saying "that's my <whatever>". It's an weak case when you need to reach outside of reality.
you do realize what you are saying right? and how dumb of suggestion it is or were your teachers growing up robot automatons who were not people?
and you do realize that marriage and relationships ARE part of education? history english etc. at what age do kids learn about what a husbands or wife is and what is marriage? because that is the same age they should learn about same sex relationships.
> I don't care who their partner is, neither does my child
lots of people do. lots of parents want their kids to not be exposed to the fact same sex couples exist, hence the don't say gay bill. and afterwards schools pulling all library books because the mere mention of a same sex couple in one is enough for them to be sued under the bill.
you are correct no one will go to jail. but school districts can be sued, which means they will not hire gay teachers because of the simple risk one parent gets upset and racks up a legal bill for them
THAT is why its so bad, how is that so difficult to understand for you?
I think that's (grade 3 -> 9yo) an ok age to start talking about sexuality. Lots of age appropriate topics there. Not sure why this is such a big deal.
I agree, but there are too many reports of teachers teaching some pretty extreme gender ideology to young kids. Things like "you can be any gender you feel like." Most people don't agree with that, and in fact there is no scientific evidence for the existence of gender at all. Sex ed is fine, but I don't think school is a place for ideological indoctrination. States are addressing this in many ham-fisted ways.
Do you know what the content of sex ed when taught to younger classes is, and why the curriculum was adopted?
Because, the core of it was to ensure that said 3rd graders knew two things: 1. What the correct anatomical names for their genitals - parts of their bodies - are, and 2. What is appropriate and inappropriate touching.
Now, the reason you want to teach these things to children, really as young as possible, is because it turns out there's been quite a lot of child abuse cases where the defense case has rested on the fact that the victims don't actually know the anatomical names of body parts. And as a result when you go to prosecute, you can't conclusively prove from their testimony what was taking place, which it turns out has a habit of not convincing juries.
A child who only will sort of gesture to the lower part of their body, because they don't know to volunteer the correct name of the body part, again, it turns out, leads to a court system which fails to apply justice properly, and also increases the general risk of abusers being able to operate because they convince their victims that everything that's happening is "okay".
Oh, and as it turns out, it's also very hard to teach children how to identify this sort of thing without touching on the idea of their being multiple sexualities, because of course to teach something like appropriate and inappropriate touching you are quite likely (a) having to service questions from children who'll ask why it's not inappropriate for mommy and daddy, or (b) have to ask what about daddy and daddy or mommy and mommy and (c) who might struggle with the notion if it's not correctly identified that the inappropriate thing will apply regardless of gender, and yet can also be appropriate for adults regardless of gender.
There's a reason no one targeting primary school level physical education classes wants to say anything more then "sex ed" because, if they had to actually cover the content of what they were opposing, they'd rather look they were basically defending child predators. Which, though not directly, they are.
Oh, and you can't base this on "well parents should be in charge of what their kids learn" because a significant amount of the time, the abusers ARE the parents.
I've gone through sex ed in third grade. All I learnt was what the name of the body parts are, that I shouldn't let other people touch them in inappropriate ways, and that boys and girls have different things going on there. I don't see why it isn't appropriate and why a 9 year old shouldn't know this.
Why is this discussion always so nationalistic? It can seem miraculous that other countries can even function. How hasn't countries with working sex ed collapsed long ago, given all the severely dysfunctional things people attribute to it?
> ... demanding they teach the curriculum he believes is correct.
I mean, there's objective truth here; "he believes is correct" is a distortion of the facts. LGBTQ people actually do exist. Suing a school district and opposing the legislation of a state that's trying to erase classes of people from existence seems like a reasonable thing to do.
The Temecula school district in question decided they wanted to remove gay-rights activist Harvey Milk from the state-approved curriculum. Are we going to be willfully naive (or just flat-out bigoted) and suggest that they wanted to do that for any reason other than not wanting their kids to know homosexuality exists?
In the case of Florida, if teachers are allowed to discuss heterosexual relationships (even just simply talking about "mom and dad") in the classroom (which of course they are), legally requiring that they pretend homosexual relationships don't exist seems a bit absurd, no?
I'm not buying any of this as liberals trying to restrict free speech. If anything, it's the opposite: what if teachers wanted to teach the material the Temecula school board decided they wanted removed? What if teachers in Florida don't want to be afraid that they just might say something about a homosexual relationship and get fired?
Don't say gay is now law for high schoolers in Florida too. The "third graders" rhetoric was always a falsehood, the law was designed to be used for all ages of students.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of legislated PC terminology for government workers somewhere (but, ironically, what first comes to mind is the banning of "Latinx" by Sanders). What about NYC protecting fat workers from being fired? Body-positivity and similar things tend to be "left" in the US.
No, this is absurd. You don't get to imagine injustices by "the left" just because you don't like them. Right now the right is actively censoring teachers as private individuals. Where is this happening from left wing politicians?
I’ll just say I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I have heard about misinformation. That term is suddenly pretty much ubiquitous.
Mitigations are now everywhere. I can’t watch a video of Elon Musk explaining how new Tesla cars will start up by recognizing specific patterns in the driver’s testicles without a big warning telling me that the video is AI-generated.
Funnily enough, the absolute best content tends to be the stuff with fact checker warnings.
Sylvia Garcia is a Democratic senator from Texas and she sponsored the EARN IT Act two of the times they tried to shove it down our throats. That would have forced sites to backdoor any encryption.
There has always been a (small) bipartisan coalition in favor of law enforcement-sponsored anti-encryption legislation, unfortunately. Senator Lindsey Graham has been a vocal sponsor of several bills recently, but he had no problem finding Democrats to co-sponsor them. We have not seen these bills go completely mainstream and get the full partisan treatment. https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/press/rep/releases/graham-c...
I wouldn't put it in the same category as book burning, but if the law had passed it would certainly have resulted in censorship.
> Although the content the EARN IT Act seeks to regulate is abhorrent and the government’s interest in stopping the creation and distribution of that content is compelling, the First Amendment still requires that the law be narrowly tailored to address those weighty concerns. Yet, given the bill’s broad scope, it will inevitably force online platforms to censor the constitutionally protected speech of their users. (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/earn-it-act-violates-c...)
The Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act of 2020 (EARN IT Act) amends an existing federal law to force online platforms into changing how they moderate content online by scanning and censoring more of their users’ communications. (https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/the-earn-it-act-is-a-d...)
If it’s hard for a provider to tell what’s unlawful, but it’ll face legal liability if it gets it wrong, then the obvious incentive is for the provider to avoid the danger zone and censor lots of lawful content along with the unlawful content, just in case. This is exactly why Section 230 immunity is so important, because without it, platforms would constantly censor a lot of legal speech by their American users – maybe your speech – as a byproduct of trying to censor illegal speech, for fear that if they didn’t cast a wide net, some illegal speech would slip through and they’d get sued for it. (https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2020/03/earn-it-act-uncon...)
The only time I hear this is when people refer to it. I've yet to find examples of it myself, bearing in mind that companies choosing what can and can't be said on their platforms doesn't constitute censorship (unless we're willing to admit that platforms have a monopoly on public communication).
When you have Federal embeds counselling companies on content, that's essentially censorship. I don't know what else you'd call it.
That's banana republic level technique and tactics. This is something a Francisco Franco might have done. No, no, we don't have censors, we're just making sure only the truth of the moment is published. And of course, blackhole all the contradictions.
It absolutely is censorship. Whether or not that censorship is illegal depends on who is doing the censorship. But the act of suppressing speech is censorship, no matter who does it.
It's not so much a shift as the US coming into alignment with the rest of the world. Harmful expressions like hate speech and inciting violence have more or less always been recognized as things you don't put up with in a civilized democratic society, just as you don't put up with physical violence to resolve disputes or allowing vehicles to drive any which way on motorway.
The essence of freedom of speech has always been the ability of the common or marginalized folk to discuss and criticize those with power and privilege - the state, the landed, the majority. Attacking marginalized minorities is not the purpose of it and is a categorically different type of action - the marginalized don't have power over others to begin with.
Frustratingly the US is actually rather poor about expression freedom in a number of other ways (ways which ironically almost never come up when Americans talk about speech freedoms), and ranks below many other western nations.
> The essence of freedom of speech has always been the ability of the common or marginalized folk to discuss and criticize those with power and privilege - the state, the landed, the majority. Attacking marginalized minorities is not the purpose of it and is a categorically different type of action - the marginalized don't have power over others to begin with.
If you make this the principle according to which you allow or censor speech, the predictable outcome is that would-be speakers will seek to establish that they are common and marginalized (or speaking for those who are) and their opponents have power and privilege (or work on behalf of those who are), as in a classical bravery debate (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debate...). In general, the powerful and privileged tend to be the ones who win these contests.
There has not been a liberal push away from encryption.
In fact, it is the fascist right that want to remove privacy, has passed laws (like PATRIOT) to do so, and the supporters simply say “if you don’t want to be spied on, then what are you hiding”
The right wing are the ones actively pushing this along with “if you think privacy is a right, then you are a predator. Won’t someone think of the children?!”
> "There has not been a liberal push away from encryption."
Pointing out Democratic congresspeople who push away from encryption does not contradict wredue's claim. Liberal is not a party affiliation, when Democratic congresspeople push away from liberal principles they are being illiberal. Liberal doesn't mean "whatever it is that Democratic politicians support".
And yes, I know this is confusing to Americans who received their political education from AM talk radio or cable television, who's understanding of the term amounts to "whatever it is that Democratic politicians say." When a Democratic politician calls for violent lyrics in rap music to be banned (as some did in the 90s), that is illiberal. When a Republican says that abortion should be legal, that is liberal. Even though liberal values are generally associated more with one party than the other, that doesn't mean liberalism is nothing more than party affiliation.
Al Gore as VP championed the Clipper Chip which proposed backdoor encryption keys to all encryption used (back when encryption was considered weaponry and regulated).
It’s not that far of a shift (at least from the 90s Clinton admin).
How does that relate to the article? It seems like a completely different subject to me, but maybe I'm misunderstanding you.
> there’s been a cultural shift in the liberal establishment over the years away from protecting speech, even hateful speech to actively espousing and advocating for censorship
The shift is to protecting the rights of people oppressed by hate speech, in the balance between its speakers and victims. It's based on the idea that the politically vulnerable have their rights - including their free speech - abridged by hate speech. It says hate speech censors the politically vulnerable, so at some points, we must censor one or the other.
It's tricky, but portraying it as 'anti-free-speech' is like portraying 'pro-life' advocates as 'anti-personal-rights'. If we're honest then it's not that simple, whatever one's perspective.
Can you define hate speech? Or “politically vulnerable”? I’m not dogging you but this sounds like an argument that someone who would like to ban E2E encryption would make. No one has a right to not be offended and we have already clearly defined where words become terroristic threats. Although the law is the least of my concerns as I get downvoted for having an opinion not totally in lock step with the social-liberal worldview.
I could take a stab at defining it but both are already defined in law (if we take 'politically vulnerable' as 'protected classes', for example) and I'd be adding to the infinite Internet crap pile if I didn't do some research first. Plenty of other dangerous speech is illegal, such as forms of incitement. It's not about feeling offended - a common way to belittle a serious, challenging issue.
I'm not sure how E2EE is implicated: If the speech isn't heard by the politically vulnerable, it's much less likely to be oppressive; if someone texts me hate speech over Signal, the encyrption doesn't matter. If it's a plan of violence, that's of course a different and existing issue.
> I get downvoted for having an opinion not totally in lock step with the social-liberal worldview.
The victim routine degrades the credibility of your comment. It looks like someone just following standard right-wing rhetoric. Also, you don't offer convincing evidence.
> I could take a stab at defining it but both are already defined in law
"Hate speech" is not defined in US law. Hate speech -- however one chooses to define it, outside of threats and incitements to violence -- is not illegal.
Hate crimes are a different story.
I've been applauding deplatforming and censorship of racist hate groups for years now, but more recently I've started becoming a bit worried that we're falling into a bizarro-world version of Niemoeller's "First they came for the socialists...".
On one hand I am worried that we are devolving to a state where no one is allowed to express an opinion that might just offend some hypothetical person, somewhere, even if no one can actually find that person. And on the other I worry that deplatforming shitty people doesn't actually fix all that much, and can often make matters worse.
> """I've been applauding deplatforming and censorship of racist hate groups for years now, but more recently I've started becoming a bit worried that we're falling into a bizarro-world version of Niemoeller's "First they came for the socialists...".
On one hand I am worried that we are devolving to a state where no one is allowed to express an opinion that might just offend some hypothetical person, somewhere, even if no one can actually find that person."""
Remember that any party that would want to stifle speech could easily pay a third party to claim to be offended by speech.
The idea that a private platform choosing not to amplify something they don't agree with, something that is clearly spelled out as their right in the first amendment, is "censorship" is absurd. If the local newspaper chooses not to run the classified ad you sent them, that's not censorship. If a big newspaper chooses not to publish the letter to the editor you sent them, that's not censorship. If FEDEX chooses not to ship the package you bring in, that's not censorship.
A business choosing not to do business with you, even in very specific and obtuse ways is not censorship. A private entity has no legal, ethical, or moral obligation to signal boost or publish anything they do not want to.
It clearly is censorship. Maybe you're conflating censorship with the First Amendment? The Constitution only protects certain kinds of speech. Only that of citizens with respect to government, and only Americans. When people speak about censorship, they are referring to all kinds of censorship by people all over the world, including private companies censoring individuals.
So just to be clear: you consider it censorship when the rest of the world tells you "you cannot harass x group by utilizing this set of harmful language"?
It clearly is, what else would one call that? Perhaps it's censorship you agree with and others agree with and maybe I agree with some of it, but it's never the less censorship. It's also censorship when the government redacts documents, but we have granted the government some carve-outs in order to protect national security and other things, which over time has become abused just like your proposition would be abused.
Also, language is not harmful. It may be abusive or offensive but it's not harmful. That's not to say people don't allow themselves to become affected by language --but one can be negatively affected by lots of language that isn't "hateful" but may be truthful or carry unwanted information.
No, censorship would be nobody being able to discuss these topics period on those platforms. That is fundamentally not happening. We've simply entered an era where you need to do it respectfully, which isn't that hard.
Furthermore, language is demonstrably harmful by way of the weight we've given it over the years. We've also made strides in society in recognizing how to avoid using or enabling it in ways that harm marginalized groups.
There's a case to be made that encryption/private communication has gone through the same sort of progress as personal weaponry has, only on a much shorter time frame and to a much greater extent.
In weaponry, it's taken ~200 years to go from bespoke muskets with a firing rate of a couple rounds per minute to semi-automatic and automatic weapons capable of firing multiple rounds per second.
In just the last 20-30 years we've gone from "if the government wants to know your speech, they are a warrant(-ish) away from getting it" to "as long as you don't make a mistake, no one will ever know what you said."
To be clear, I'm not advocating for encryption restrictions. I'm just saying that almost no one advocates for the 2nd amendment right to a bazooka, and it could reasonably be argued that a bazooka isn't remotely equivalent to the present ability of just about anyone to conceal their speech.
> I'm just saying that almost no one advocates for the 2nd amendment right to a bazooka
This isn't necessarily true. To believe that the 2nd amendment allows the right to carry a concealed weapon basically anywhere sort of requires one to believe every citizen has the right to carry any weapon. The amendment is meant to indicate that congress simply can't regulate whether citizens choose to own and carry around weapons, and what sort of weapons those might be. If the weapon could be considered an "arm," it can't be regulated.
This is one of the obvious modern flaws with the USA constitution and why the 2nd amendment should be abolished before any reasonable gun control can happen in the USA. Kavanaugh and other justices right now seem to think that there are "of course" conditions and restrictions that should be allowed, like not carrying guns into "sensitive places" or not allowing felons to have guns, but a future justice can simply disagree, and that's that.
Also, many people in the USA believe they should be allowed to have a bazooka.
I absolutely believe I should be able to own a bazooka, and that the second and first amendments are equally critical for a free state.
People use exactly the same arguments you’re making to justify speech restrictions.
It’s my belief that there’s an underlying social pathology wherein some people are happy to hand power to the state in order to feel safe, regardless of the ultimate consequences, whether we’re discussing arms or speech or any other fundamental right.
The alternate social pathology is maintaining some kind of illusion of ability to resist a fascist government with weapons a previous more liberal government allowed you to have.
If the government recedes to a level of totalitarianism wherein you must use your guns to protect your way of life, there's been absolute failures on uncountable levels, and guns won't fix anything. If you threaten to use your gun to destabilize the authoritarian government, they have five hundred ways to kill you easily from a distance. "But guerrilla warfare!" If you're stockpiling guns so as to be one day be a guerrilla, why not instead just take action now to prevent your government becoming that way, by voting for more progressive leaders, participating in protests, and engaging in civil disobedience and disruption?
I don't disagree with the general idea of restricting the ability of government to control personal freedoms to a certain degree, but it doesn't make any sense to me why we like to use the government to regulate what companies are allowed to put in the food they sell us, but not regulate what kind of guns our neighbors can own.
Also free states exist outside of the USA, so clearly those amendments are not a prerequisite of freedom.
I also wouldn't call it a pathology in the average case, not unless you believe there is no use for law, courts, police etc, and are a proponent of anarchy.
Hence why I said "almost" no one. I'd bet a dollar that the number of people arguing for free ownership of bazookas is low-single-digits of a percent of the population. But I'd love to see hard numbers on that :-)
The second amendment is all that is left of a philosophy about how the national defense should be done. Originally the intent was that there would be no standing army because it would be too dangerous to democracy. In cases of emergency the militia (armed citizens) would be called upon to defend the nation. It would make perfect sense to have all the necessities for fighting a defensive war in private hands.
Odd example, only a small handful of states restrict 50 BMG rifles e.g. "high powered sniper rifles", and basically none restrict the normal sort of rifles that would normally be used by snipers. You can even go over 50 calibre with a background check and a tax stamp.
Even with plastic explosives, basically anybody who isn't a fugitive, convicted felon or a drug user is allowed to get a federal license for explosives.
No one, not my mother, not my government, not my dog, has the implicit right to monitor a conversation between myself and another party
No one has the right to dictate the manner in which I communicate with another individual, contending that it doesn't cause network problems (such as the FCC and radio band restrictions. And to the point, I believe the ban of cryptographic communication on public radio channels to be unlawful and unethical)
I knew absolutely no privacy during most of my childhood. Many times I did not even have a door to my room. Every single bit of privacy I did attain was an act of defiance. Even owning an email address was against the rules of my household, but if I hadn't protected my right to do so and to conceal the act of doing so, I wouldn't be here today as an engineer discussing the merits of privacy on the internet with you.
God forbid what an entire organization of narcissists and control freaks can accomplish when given legal blessing.
As an aside, you might find it interesting that cryptography was actually classified as munitions in the United States at one point, so the analogy does have merit.
I agree with you and the word “implicit” is crucial here.
If the state is suspicious of you then they can come over, break in, tie you up, search all your stuff, and take anything they like home with them. It sounds infuriating but it’s what we need in order for the state to catch villains and the crucial part is they can only do it with a warrant.
If a judge ordered you to unlock your phone and hand over all your messages, you’d probably be sour but you should also be morally ok with complying.
The crucial underpinning of this ideology is that We The People have given explicit permission to a specific group of individuals to have this power in exchange for freedoms we could not otherwise attain; rarely can something in life be so pure, a balance usually must be struck when considering such a complex system. In the US, we employed a three-party checks and balances system to try to solve this problem in a more distributed manner.
Obviously there might be unsolved issues around a) preventing such a system from decaying over time and b) providing some sort of mechanism for people born into a governing society they do not agree with to travel to another society without unachievable economic hurdles. This of course too has limits.
I do differ with you in that I do not believe another entity has the right to compel anyone to do anything. The judge can take my phone, but if it's locked, I cannot be compelled to produce a password. This is established by the fifth amendment, but would probably be better formalized today in a new constitution.
Not the OP, but I find the idea that people should help authorities convict themselves absolutely abhorrent.
You shouldn't be even compelled to help the government convict your loved ones, much less yourself. The government has enough money, powers and people at its disposal, why should they be allowed to be lazy and strongarm you into helping them against your vital interests?
Go far enough in that direction and you'll end up with show trials.
You're ok with it because the social contract is that it only happens with reason, to people who have done something to deserve it.
But now it's more like dictatorship and police controlling opinions, which, when it happens in non-western-aligned countries, we all agree that is a really bad thing.
I consider technology to be an extension of mind. I'm not ok with the police literally cracking open my skull and probing my brain, not just because of the invasive torturous nature, but because it's an invasion of the very state that forms my existence. Similarly, the bits of my mind that I offload to other places.
Yeah, I think a good question to distinguish the different philosophies here is: if we had a perfect lie detector, would you support defendants being compelled to use it, with adverse assumptions for refusing?
So like, if you wrote a journal detailing a bunch of crimes and/or criminal motives, you don't think that journal should be admissable as evidence in a criminal proceeding? Nor do you think that a warrant should be capable of granting access to that journal for the purposes of a criminal investigation?
That part that's literally (and legally, AFAIK) part of your mind is the code you use to unlock your phone. You can't be compelled to hand that over. I believe the same logic would apply to gorgoiler's scenario if you had a keypad lock on the door (the cops might be allowed to physically break it, but they couldn't compel you to share the code). I'm no lawyer/expert, though.
The moral justification of the situation to be irrelevant - in an ideal world messages would be held in some plausible-deniability system where it is impossible for the judge to know if someone has complied or not.
Nobody has a right to snoop on other people's communication. Not even people wearing robs and wigs.
> If a judge ordered you to unlock your phone and hand over all your messages, you’d probably be sour but you should also be morally ok with complying.
No. It is not my moral obligation to obey the orders of other human beings. Ever.
If you want this to be a moral issue you must first prove that there is a moral basis for compliance and I've yet to hear one. Pointing a gun to my face and telling me what to do doesn't sound moral to me. You can ask. Nicely.
There doesn't really have to be a moral basis nor does there have to be consent. You can refuse, and you can choose to live outside of society. That might be very difficult, but you have the choice. For many, society doesn't provide any advantages and so they choose non-compliance and all the consequences that come with it.
"Live outside of society" has a nice ring to it, but the meaning of those words when choosing to disobey court orders converts via bailiff to residing in jail cell. That's not living "outside society" or its constraints. It's very inside of them.
If you want to actually live outside of society, perhaps the only way to do that is on a simple sailboat like Moxie did for a while:
But even that only works temporarily because eventually something breaks or runs out, and you will be re-confronted by reality (some society somewhere) once ashore. For example your hypothetical phone unlock is what happened to Moxie. From Wikipedia:
"While entering the U.S. on a flight from the Dominican Republic in 2010, Marlinspike was detained by federal agents for nearly five hours, all his electronic devices were confiscated, and at first agents claimed he would only get them back if he provided his passwords so they could decrypt the data. Marlinspike refused to do this, and the devices were eventually returned, though he noted that he could no longer trust them, saying, "They could have modified the hardware or installed new keyboard firmware."
There are millions of people who live totally lawless lives. Sometimes they get imprisoned, also sometimes they get killed or tortured. But living a life of crime is a choice available to everyone.
You cannot choose to live outside of society. See: Waco, Rubgy Ridge, etc. You cannot even choose to renounce the citizenship that you did not want, never asked for, and never consented to, without getting another citizenship first.
The social contract is the only contract in the world that you can be legally bound to the terms of without ever having agreed to it. In this way, the government acts very much like any other organized crime group: "follow the rules we create or else".
There are plenty of organised crime syndicates who live outside of society. They sometimes get caught by law enforcement and sometimes they get caught by rival gangs.
I didn’t say you can live outside of society peacefully in such a way that everyone will just leave you alone but a life of crime is a choice available to everyone.
This is a naive perspective. The reality is it's not available, but gets forced upon entire classes of people as the only viable option, and leads to a lifetime of economic and emotional struggle.
But it’s still a choice right? Like a life of crime may be the lesser of two evils but even that is a choice.
People for whom the system offers no advantages are far more likely to make that choice.
My original point is that the current state of the law is not some grand moral absolute, it’s just how things happen to have worked out based on a bunch of decisions made by a bunch of people.
You can choose how to react to that up to and including breaking the law. The degree to which you do that can determine your consequences.
Also sometimes the bear eats you and you’re just unlucky.
> you can choose to live outside of society. That might be very difficult
Try "impossible". No person reading HN is prepared to forgo all of what civilization provides. There are probably a very few people on the planet, who are already living in an extremely isolated tribal setting, who could go it alone, but if they're reading HN I hope they'll speak up now, I'd love to hear their opinion on this.
The clear implication of your original statement was that it is possible to not owe society anything by not taking anything from others. To do that requires a level of self-sufficiency that only a very small fraction of people possess.
“For many, society doesn't provide any advantages and so they choose non-compliance and all the consequences that come with it.”
So what I mean is you can choose to live outside of society, meaning not complying with laws. That is lawlessness, it’s a life of crime.
Living as a sovereign citizen outside of any legal structure in such a way that you neither depend on any legal structure nor do you infringe upon any legal structure is very difficult, and available only to a very small number of people.
And I’m saying that people who do that are ethically compromised in general, and dishonest if they think they are “outside of society” while still benefitting from mains electricity, mass-produced goods, etc.
> It is not my moral obligation to obey the orders of other human beings.
If you are prepared to live without everything "other human beings" offer you, then sure -- but you're not prepared to do that. So you must reach some sort of agreement with "other human beings" even if that means obeying the occasional "order".
> If you are prepared to live without everything "other human beings" offer you, then sure -- but you're not prepared to do that. So you must reach some sort of agreement with "other human beings" even if that means obeying the occasional "order".
I don't obey their orders. If I cooperate with another entity I do so on my own terms. I am only morally accountable to myself and must reckon with any consequences of my actions that might reflect harm upon me. I have agency.
So yes, I must operate in an ordered system but at no point am I morally obligated to another actor.
To be fair, it was still hard to hide "metadata". If you met someone in person, or sent a letter, then it would be hard to conceal that from someone surveiling you
The difference was they had to be actively targeting you beforehand, and it was an ongoing high expense per target. Now we bulk collect data on the basis that someone might be guilty in the future
I'm real uncomfortable with comparing kinetic weaponry to communications encryption. These aren't even remotely similar things in damage scope.
The argument in favor of private communications is in fact predicated on this: no one can actually cause damage just by communicating. Damage might happen as a result of it, but there is no information so dangerous that the transmission of it must be known up front, and should be pre-emptively scanned for and alerted on. There is always a chain of additional activities and actions which is required for harm to eventuate.
Not only only that, there is something so intrinsically human about communication, and something so vulnerable about having every word archived. How does it go? "Give me a sentence from and honest man and I'll find a way to hang him?" or something.
To be clear, I 100% believe that self defense is also intrinsic to being a mobile animal, and everyone has the right to be their own first line of self defense. But most people go their entire lives without needing to defend their self, but nobody goes more than a few days without needing to communicate with someone, often somewhat intimately. The amount of words someone generates is staggering, and if archived arbitrarily, can almost certainly be used against them.
Eh, I've never much cared for that quote or the common interpretation of it. People take it as though the problem is the surveillance. But it's the last part which tells you what's up: "I'll find a way to hang him".
The speaker is telling you what they're going to do - everything else is a formality. Your problem began well before they had a sentence, and wouldn't end if they didn't have one.
A malicious, unlawful actor should be denied all methods of acting out their purpose, as long as it doesn't hurt lawful actors more than they are willing to accept.
I think it's interesting that all of these discussions imply that there is nothing essential about the right to self defense [even from governments] using the most effective tools possible.
Actually, I believe you have this backwards. In the time when the Constitution was written, conversations were private (concealed) by default. In order to listen to a conversation, you had to physically listen to the conversation. It is only in the last couple decades that mass access to this sort of conversation is even possible, so encryption seems to be restoring the same implicit right which always existed.
Said another way, if you want to analogize e2e encryption to a bazooka, then the government being able to read all of your private communications seems to be the equivalent of having someone constantly violating the fourth (remember that one?) amendment in your house, 24/7.
Sure, technology has benefitted the government as well. But if you're going to cite the fact that 250 years ago surveillance required live eavesdropping, then the weapon analogy needs to go back to the time before guns and other range weapons, when you had to physically shove in the pointy bit.
In any case, my point was about the ability of civilians to conceal, surveillance is only relevant in its inability to keep up.
To your main point, it's important to understand that most people don't feel the need to conceal their conversations from the government. Note: this is not an "if you're not doing crime, what do you need to hide?" argument. I'm just stating the fact that the reason the government can surveil so much information is because people don't choose to encrypt their communications. If they did, the government would have access to very little. Until/unless they set up cameras and microphones everywhere.
It has never been easier for the government to access your speech because never before has such a large portion of speech been recorded.
Police 30 years ago would kill for the data they have access to now. Encryption slightly slows down how quickly the amount of information they have access to is growing, but it can't remotely complete with how quickly the amount of available information is growing.
As I replied to someone else, it's important to understand that the only reason the government can surveil so much information is because people don't bother to encrypt their communications. If they did, the government would have access to very little, because government-resistant is readily available.
It's really only just the US being an outlier here. There's no other western country where people think it's normal or a fundamental right to carry automatic weaponry.
I therefore cannot see the comparison to encrypted communication. Everyone communicates, increasingly through software. To keep things that once were private private, encryption is a key ingredient.
There’s also no other western country with anything nearly as strong as the first amendment.
Not sure what your point is.
(Also, the production of new automatic weapons for the civilian market has been illegal since 1986, and civilian ownership of automatic weapons is heavily regulated).
In my opinion, the comparison to weaponry is pretty loaded and unreasonable. It evokes scenes of mass shootings, secure communication has no similar destructive power.
Warrants are still a thing! The government in the US can still get a warrant and they can compel you to show them the contents of your Signal messages. No fancy E2E backdoors are required. ;-)
I'm having trouble finding coverage in this, but I believe the current state is that the warrant can require you to unlock the phone but you don't have to tell them how or provide your password.
The authors of the Declaration of Independence are also the authors of the Constitution, premised in part on English Common Law, in which the public is entitled to every man's evidence.
I think "entitled to every man's evidence" means that there is a compulsory subpoena power to make people testify. One can call a hostile witness, and in the absence of a corresponding privilege against testifying, the witness can be punished for refusing to testify, as a contemnor (or for testifying falsely, as a perjuror).
This idea is distinct from search and covert eavesdropping powers, which may have also existed at common law but perhaps not under that same principle?
Yeah, I don't think the public claim to every person's evidence vindicates dragnet surveillance! I think these are complicated issues, we can make our own policy decisions and we can find a right to privacy even if one didn't exist at the time of the founders.
I'm just reacting to the notion that we've departed from the principles of the founders by giving law enforcement access to evidence. My impression, from the bit of reading I've done, is that wouldn't have shocked the conscience of the founders at all.
I'm not sure how you mean to apply that idea. If you mean that it balances the right of privacy, that seems like a stretch to apply to encryption. My evidence might be in my head, for example. Nothing stops me from burning records unless they already are potential evidence in an active case. I could delete this comment.
Yes, Wired was originally pretty libertarian, but that was a long time ago. I don’t know what it’s like now.
As for what’s mainstream American, people disagree. Historically, we’re a pretty unruly people. Still are, sometimes. But here is the Fourth Amendment:
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
(Emphasis added.) You can argue about whether that should also apply to secure online communications, but the idea that there are compromises between state power and individual rights is pretty fundamental to US law.
We've seen example after example of the Fourth Amendment being trampled all over with zero consequences. Why bother arguing over possible edge cases (and I personally don't see any reason online communications wouldn't be covered) when there are no meaningful consequences for even the most cut and dry violations. Like, why argue the finer points of a right that we effectively don't have?
In a large country, I think it could be true that there are many violations of a rule, and at the same time, the rule is often enforced and is doing some good.
Follow the money - Wired is a Condé Nast property (for some time) which is in turn, owned by Advance Publications, one of the largest media conglomerates.
What sets the modern era apart from the rest of human history is that Marlinspike's ideas are radical yet commonplace at the same time. He's in the company of people like Thomas Jefferson who advocated the idea of permanent revolution, or that the rebellion against unjust government would never end. It would keep on happening through the ballot box. That is what democracy is. It is continuous small, non-violent revolutions against the government.
This is quite different from almost every prior form of social system in human history and it's arguably the single largest idea which has contributed to lifting humanity out of poverty, war, oppression and misery (the scientific method is a very close competitor for that distinction, but without permanent revolution most scientists probably would have been burned at the stake or ignored).
There will always be people - the powerful, the entrenched, and maybe just the ill-informed, cowardly or intellectually lazy - who are terrified by the notion of permanent revolution, so to them it's radical. (One wonders what camp this writer falls in, because usually journalists are well aware of this stuff, for many it's their raison d'etre. Has this one taken a civics class? Do they believe Jefferson was arguing for anarchy? If so have they looked up the definition of that word in a dictionary?)
But despite the fears of those people, permanent revolution is the secret sauce modern society is built upon. Western civilization has a long line of prominent thinkers and historical examples which has led to this way of organizing ourselves. It is precious and it is still new and if we lose it we might never get it back again.
Anyway, I like the argument that Signal's CEO makes here [1], which is that for virtually all of human history, privacy has been the default. The Constitution was written before the invention of the telegram. At that point in history you could always go into a room alone with someone else, have a conversation, and be reasonably assured that the conversation was private. Bugs and wires didn't exist. Wiretapping didn't exist, surveillance didn't exist unless you had a third human physically present.
This makes privacy akin to a natural right, something we have always had, that we are entitled to by nature of being human. I'm of the view that the US needs a Constitutional amendment to protect it, and if any government seeks to deny it we should give them a reminder of what permanent revolution is and show them how it works.
I remember, as a young italian studying about risorgimento, asking my mother why did the people in venice and milan not want to be under the austrian empire.
My mum told me "it was an oppressive government". When I asked to elaborate she said "they used to read people's mails so that they knew whom to arrest."
In italy you can end up in jail if you open mails… and yet somehow we are completely ok with the government reading every electronic communication?
In a previous era of journalism an article such as this one would include comment, if there was one, from Whisper themselves. There are quotes in there but they are ones reported by other journalists for other articles.
That’s fine — it’s what editorial is after all — but it could have been made clearer.
Yeah. It's been sad to see how far we've fallen back, in the 10 years since Snowden. I'd argue we've gone even further than regressing, with an outspoken support for civil liberties and healthy skepticism of authorities being seen as not merely "kooky", but increasingly "harmful to society"
I was hoping to maybe be able to skirt around it, but I think it's unavoidable to discuss this without explicitly saying: the concerning part is that it's increasingly the left doing this. When I was younger I used to be able to rely on that side of the spectrum to be at the forefront of calling out creeping authority like that, which should be unsurprising, given their core philosophy. Yet in the past 5 or so years they seem determined to throw that away and declare that a healthy distrust of the government is in fact a right-wing-exclusive thing, for some reason. Strange self-sabotage, and especially strange when it manifests as people of that affiliation implicitly (or explicitly) praising alphabet agencies
Yeah, any discussion of anonymity and Signal can start and end with phone numbers. They could maybe offer an option to use just a username and some kind of authentication? But somehow they don’t :(
No mention in your criticism above that bringing genuine e2e encryption to the masses in a way that is actually used by billions of people had not been achieved and many thought was totally impossible until Moxie went and did it.
Once you acknowledge that incredible achievement that nobody else got close to previously, you can then criticise anything you think could have been done better. Or could be improved in the future.
I know when I do it I'm doing something similar to criticising Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's execution of his skyhook and that is a reasonable thing to acknowledge, even when I'm 100% sure that my criticism is legitimate.
Worse, they store your phone number (along with your name, your photo, and most damning of all, a list of all of your signal contacts) permanently in the cloud. This is exactly the information they used to brag about not being able to turn over to the authorities because they didn't collect it in the first place. Their website still has pages that brag about that with no indication that it's no longer the truth.
I've seen way too many signal users who had no idea this data collection was even happening which is a good sign that Signal isn't very trustworthy. If you're going to promote yourself to whistleblowers and activists, they need to know what data you're collecting and what their risks are, but ever since Signal started collecting all this data they've refused to update their privacy policy which even now starts with "Signal is designed to never collect or store any sensitive information." which is an outright lie. I'm pretty sure at this point it's a dead canary warning people not to trust the service. They've been very unclear in their communications about the data collection too.
They've removed features people loved (the ability to get secure communications and unsecured SMS/MMS in a single app) and they've pushed weird crypto features nobody asked for, which might be another sign they're trying to encourage users to leave the platform, but I sure see them come up a lot in the news. Signal seems to get a lot of promotion. At this point though, people looking for secure communication might want to look for something else.
Signal is very much a first generation private messaging application (in the sense that it was the first generation actually adopted). I think we're starting to see true gen 2 protocols rise to fix some of the issues it has like matrix, berty, briar, etc.
Whenever this is mentioned, the answer is always the ease of adoption. Less tech literate people can just use their phone number and they won't have to bother themselves with anything else.
I don't think the article accurately represents anarchism / Marlinspike's philosophy.
The article seems to be trying to say that anarchist values are the root of Signal, but this is a barrier to pragmatism or general adoption.
It describes anarchism, or, the principles of it that Marlinspike adopted (which aren't inherently anarchist. Though Marlinspike is of course an anarchist), as "far out on the political fringe." It says explicitly "sticking to anarchism would imply an almost certain defeat." It implies Marlinspike agrees by dropping his quote on anarchist failure.
However, in the quoted article from Marlinspike, he absolutely doesn't imply something being anarchist relegates it to failure. From his article https://moxie.org/stories/promise-defeat/
> Anarchists are best known for their failures... And yet, far from trying to suppress these histories, these are the stories that anarchists recount. ... This is unusual. American Patriots do not speak, with a gleam in their eyes, of the incredible number of battles that George Washington lost (and he lost almost as much as anarchists do). ... The difference between the ways Nationalists and Anarchists talk about their histories seems critical.
> Will there ever be a night — one glorious evening — when the world is won? Where suddenly civilization, the spectacle, class, racism, and patriarchy all simultaneously topple and remain in ruins? ... It seems unlikely to happen in one moment. ... The George Washingtons of the world offer success. This is based on "realism" and the logic of quantifiability, where it is necessary to make compromises, pass laws, and assert control. Because these are the things that can be won; this is where success is found.
> Anarchy, by contrast, offers us defeat. ... Anarchists are such failures because, really, there can be no victory. Our desires are always changing with the the context of our conditions and our surroundings. What we gain is what we manage to tease out of the conflicts between what we want and where we are. ... Remember that success is a word used to measure. It describes dollars made, people counted, votes cast. In other words, it's a swindle. The rejection of quantification, the emphasis on the role of the individual, is what makes anarchism unique.
By my interpretation, the article is pulling a George Washington, trying to quantify the success of anarchism-in-software, or perhaps private communication, to whether signal can "go mainstream."
> For an idealistic engineer to succeed, he will have to build something that is useful to many.... Signal’s success depends on maintaining its principled anarchist commitments while finding a wide-ranging appeal to the masses
No, Signal is already successful, it's probably already achieved Marlinspike's goal of actualizing a "normal" way to do end to end encrypted private communication (and made it easy for his friends to do so), and it's absolutely achieved the general philosophical goal, through the popularity of the protocol, of giving people the chance to be in control of their surroundings.
If Signal "fails," I guess by not growing its userbase more, the anarchist solution is to build again for whatever the new context is. The Win is there, we'd have the memories of Signal, it existed and let us maintain control of our surroundings if even only briefly.
Example:
> Signal also doesn’t do a good job serving some of its core users. Activists and organizers deal with huge amounts of messages that involve many people and threads, but Signal’s interface lacks ways to organize all this information.
The solution is build again. Or, squat. If people can find a way to make Slack work to organize an antifascist protest, even if it means trading end to end encryption, then, that's a win.
Signal would be a lot more pragmatic if they would develop a funding model based on selling something for actual money, rather then subsisting off donations.
Sell "Signal for Business" accounts or something so I can stop having my bank or local government depend on SMS to communicate with me. I know a number of doctors who'd really love to be able to use Signal to talk to their patients (and would tell them to install it) if it was possible to sanely integrate with it from their practice management software.
As it is, Signal lives in the same space that every other "free" internet service does - if you're not the customer, you're the product. And we get to just wait till that bill comes due.
They've established their name and reputation, now they need to build on top of that. Like Mozilla and their VPN product, Signal can do a similar thing, keeping the Signal free.
That is a mistake by Mozilla IMO. They could've done better. But VPN is just a beginning, there are many other opportunities. Like recently-launched containerized JS playground. Or hosted email. Or Nextcloud-like product in general. Many ways to go.
They've established their name and reputation, now they need to build on top of that. Like all the other VC products, Signal can do a similar thing, keeping the Signal free.
I agree with this! But they seem to have backed themselves into a corner where anything pro-business automatically has to be anti-privacy so they dont do it. I guess there must be some technical challenges to opening up Signal APIs to third parties?
I was against WhatsApp for Business until I had to use it to communicate with Virgin Atlantic. It was so much better than getting on the phone to call them! It probably took longer overall whilst waiting an hour or two between replies, but having a history of the conversation and knowing there's someone reading my request in full and replying properly was great.
I dont know why Signal are wasting their time with cryptocurrency projects, whilst the normal app seems pretty stagnant. I'd love a 3rd party API or bot system that was done in a tasteful and private way, but I dont believe there are any plans for it.
No first class support means I've never dug into it myself. You never know if the thing you build is going to work from one day to the next - how reliable have they been? How do you do the phone number validation step? I'll look into it...
It's been very reliable for me. I use the method Signal Desktop uses, where you bind signald as a client to your phone, and it's worked great. It does mean you need a phone, but the method where signald is the client directly has worked well too. It needs a phone number, obviously, but you authenticate it once (with an SMS) and that's it.
If they sell anything at all, it exposes them to the local regulations of wherever they are taking money, and then the survival of the org and technology becomes dependent on the income, which has conditions attached to it.
Saying Signal should sell something is like recommending someone develop a drug habit.
Signal Foundation is incorporated in America, so they're already exposed to American regulations. They could sell things (tshirts or exclusive client features or something) in America without exposing themselves more than they already are.
I thought about merch and things like that, but really, this is an open source project that a lot of people depend on, and it just happens to be backed by a US foundation, which is a pretty good structure.
Imo, the real risk to Signal will come from partisan and intelligence linked agitators from academia taking over its board and stacking the project with people who will add back doors, or acquiesce to state meddling. The more formal and complex the organization becomes the more likely it will be infiltrated and subverted. It's worth having a 5-10 year horizon for planning privacy tech - and organizing to make the arms race in it less necessary by reining in the agencies who threaten it.
I'm optimistic about the bluesky protocol, and what twitter may become, but without mitigating the official powers of privacy's antagonists, it's just a toy distraction. If you aren't using privacy tools to form networks and organize to preserve privacy, the tools only enable timidity.
This is why I was suggesting in another thread that Signal should preemptively pull out of the UK in response to their crypto legislation, as hiding from these people is just a substitute for action.
I've always laughed at people who insist Whatsapp messages are just as secure as Signal messages.
Like, prove to me Facebook isn't logging and storing every single cryptographic key generated in that entire protocol. Oh, you can't because the entire app is closed source? And you just blindly trust that Facebook is doing the right thing and not decrypting every message to scour it for every bit of information possible?
This idea seems to rely on the flawed assumption that you can’t security audit closed source software. This is not an assumption I’ve ever seen an actual security researcher make.
Quite the opposite, they start with techniques they work on the binary and only use the source (if available) as a helpful reference. Hiding back doors in source has a long and storied history so relying on it to audit security has long been out of favor.
What are the best ways to test for backdoors though? Phoning home I get. But what about just breaking in because there's a backdoor left in for when "they" single you out for persecu- I mean investigation.
You read the compiled artifact. It's not complicated. Source code gives you valuable added context about programmer intent, which is helpful to understand how a program is structured, but you can't trust that intent if you're looking for surreptitious code anyways, and you don't need to to work out what the program is doing.
You can check it yourself with reverse engineering tools, e.g. on Android you could look at the APK with jadx and see the decompiled Signal implantation, and how it compares to the open source Java library from Signal that it is derived from.
Would it be unfair of me to rephrase as, "It is possible to do this ridiculous, difficult thing that doesn't even always work in order to get some insight into a situation which would be trivial if the source were available with reproducible builds"?
Reverse engineering is not onerously difficult if you have the right tools, some experience, and a decent grasp of assembly language. It's only really annoying if you can't use a debugger.
You just need to understand assembly. Maybe there are books that can help, I'm not aware of any, but to get started I'd recommend taking a binary of any open source software (preferably a non-optimised build, or just your own hello world with some loops etc), run it in a debugger, and step through each assembly instruction at a time and figure out what it's doing, with the corresponding source code. Eventually you may be able to do this without needing the source code, which is the goal. I think this is about the same effort as learning a new language (spoken, not programming), i.e. it'll take months of being immersed in it to get good at it.
On the other hand, maybe your binary can be decompiled to source code (e.g. CFR can decompile java classes, I've used that a bit but haven't checked if that's useful for Android apps).
Maybe this was bad advice, this approach is like trying to learn a spoken language by listening to a recording and looking up each word at a time. Probably it'd be better to get a deep understanding of how CPUs work in general, I can recommend the book Computer Organization and Design by Hennessy and Patterson for this. I agree with the other commenter that 15 years is more realistic so maybe just start by getting a 4 year degree in CompSci (and that book will probably be required reading).
Security auditing an app by source is not automatically easier than security auditing an app from its actual runtime behavior. Source can be a 1mloc tangled mess or have some vulnerable dependency deep in your dependency tree causing app to behave insecurely which could be quickly detected by monitoring how the app behaves in use, network packets sent, memory etc. How else do you think many 0days to closed products were found?
What you say can be true if source is readable and well written and you have somehow a guarantee that source is not modified before publishing the app. Or if you just are inexperienced with auditing the app other than reading the code (I know I am).
This is really helpful for understanding, thank you. Perhaps the question is improved by incorporating the intent of the maintainers. An example:
If we're interested in whether WhatsApp's developers have implemented the Signal protocol in good faith, because we suspect they have not (we suspect they've put in backdoors at the behest of bad governments), then having the source available (and reproducible builds to use) allows us to check that more easily than analysis on the binary's behavior.
This is because the primary way the duplicitous maintainers would do this is in their own source. It's possible (and for three letter agencies probably common and desirable) to deliberately introduce bugs in dependencies that provide the desired behavior in some end product, but it probably shouldn't be our base case. Our base case should be: you swear your code implements the Signal protocol without backdoors...ok, great, you show us the code.
It does, but you're not really allowed to use it at scale. Open whisper systems has repeatedly threatened to play cat and mouse games with any third party distribution based on reproducible builds and lock them out.
They are fully entitled to do that of course, as it is their system. But that makes it far less useful for hobbyists.
Also as a slight but important aside, the article mentions end-to-end encryption technology that existed prior to Signal in its opening sentence. It may be that Signal pioneered E2EE chat, but it didn't pioneer E2EE itself. It built upon it in a way that was perhaps more accessible or appealing to a mass audience.
That prior technology, by the way, PGP, is not and was never universally hated. Many businesses continue to use PGP today to exchange encrypted communications with suppliers and customers. It's mostly file transfers, but some businesses even support secure email via PGP, and it's been integrated into a modern secure email product from a Swiss company, Proton, targeted at both consumers and businesses.
Or Signal could be the most well orchestrated honey pot. The server code is already partially closed source. What I don't understand is how a small organization like that cannot be convinced or compelled by a very powerful government intelligence agency. I will stick with decentralized protocols I can host myself.
People here will massively downvote your comment. The truth is that you are 100% correct in suspecting about that messenger.
Since a long time that is known how Signal was initially sponsored by Radio Free Asia, which in turn is fueled by the CIA. For some reason western pages are disappearing on this topic, but after some search there are still some: https://greatgameindia.com/how-cia-created-signal-messenger-...
Then comes the development of the algorithm itself. Moxei invited more crypto experts to write the algorithm while surfing in Hawaii. Quite strange of a chouse and zero details how those trips were sponsored but would know by "coincidence" what else is headquartered in Hawaii? NSA.
Last but not least comes WhatsApp. With a billion users decides almost overnight to switch to the algorithm developed by this relatively unknown and smallish group called Signal. I'm not even observing how mainstream media is invariably supporting Signal with positive news while Telegram is negatively pictured.
All these "signals" (that is an intelligence term btw), plus the fact of closed source code should be enough to raise eyebrows. But nope, you will see a sea of pedantic answers and downvoting whenever pointing the facts. Don't worry, you are not alone.
Does the actual cryptography has anything suspicious-looking? I generally share your suspicion of the origins of Signal, but wouldn't the cryptography itself also look fairly odd if it were designed to be weak?
They don't have to weaken the crypto. If you go "on the list", they just send you new code that starts using weak/no encryption. If you aren't on the list, then you'll never see this.
The problem with Signal (and anything like Signal) is not the server code, but the client code distributed through app stores. We have had email encryption for decades without ever having to trust any email servers.
Is your claim that this is currently happening? If so, why has nobody detected it? Since such code would have to be distributed to user devices, it would be detectable.
Also, did you know that Signal is distributed through multiple channels? The iOS App Store, Google Play, F-Droid, as well as directly through Signal's website. Given this, how could they target an individual with tampered binaries in a way that they couldn't notice? Seems pretty hard to me.
Pegasus was much, much more intrusive than a targeted payload from the Play Store and it took years before that was discovered.
Note that Signal is specifically not allowed to be distributed outside of their own apk download and Google/Apple. They have made that repeatedly clear and will take measures against such distribution.
Security is not a scalar. It is probably better for the mass audience but worse if your adversaries includes Google employees.
Take note of your threat model. From what we know of three letter agencies, they probably won't bother. They prefer spyware-like control of the end device. That way they don't need to target the encryption of individual apps, it is far more effective to collect communications after it is decrypted and read by the target.
With the exception of F-Droid, all options you mention cooperate closely with the US security agencies. In case you were not aware, some years ago in Germany you'd see Apple and the local government sending targeted updates for OSX laptops to be tracked.
> ... how mainstream media is invariably supporting Signal with positive news while Telegram is negatively pictured.
But people are voting... Telegram had 700 million users at the beginning of 2023. I think the reason Telegram is constantly negatively pictured has nothing to do with Signal: it is because it is an actual threat to WhatsApp's dominance.
Regarding the supposed benefits of Signal: this thing is collecting metadata left and right. And metadata are much more important than the content of the messages themselves.
I simply don't trust Signal.
I don't trust Telegram either but at least Telegram doesn't pretend and, well, Telegram is actually used by my family and friends.
If you want genuine responses or discussions, I'd recommend in the future to open up with an argument for the belief/point you are holding, instead of a catch-all opener.
> It also required its users to think like engineers, which included participating in exceptionally nerdy activities like attending real-life “key-signing parties” to verify your identity to other users.
In fairness to PGP, Signal uses exactly the same method as PGP does for verifying identities. You need to check a ridiculously long number which represents your correspondent's identity. It's a 40 digit hex "key fingerprint" in the case of PGP and a 60 digit decimal "safety number" in the case of Signal. The difference is that Signal will cheerfully let the user have an insecure conversation before the user has verified the safety number. PGP makes it very difficult to fail in that particular way.
Signal has a separate safety number for each of your devices. So it makes it significantly harder to keep up with the user verification than with PGP which has a single key fingerprint per user.
So you could totally have a Signal identity party for exactly the same reasons as in the PGP case...
I think it’s pretty important to point out that Signal allows you to import this number with a QR code, so it’s not very arduous to do to verification.
The internet would be a much more enjoyable place if everyone who was completely incapabale of using a cli and not even willing to attempt learning how to use one simply disappeared from it.
I enjoy the internet because I can interact with and learn from people with very different skillsets and experiences than me. I don't think I would enjoy it very much if it were only used by computer enthusiasts.
This is a terrible and very un-empathetic take. The internet would be a much more enjoyable place if we strive to make it as secure, useful, and accessible as possible to as many people as possible instead of gatekeeping it to a certain group we decide are worthy because they are capable of browsing HN with curl instead of Chrome or something like that
> The internet would be a much more enjoyable place if we strive to make it as secure, useful, and accessible as possible to as many people as possible instead of gatekeeping it to a certain group we decide are worthy because they are capable of browsing HN with curl instead of Chrome or something like that
An ideal to aspire but many will use for things worst than porn.
> The difference is that Signal will cheerfully let the user have an insecure conversation before the user has verified the safety number. PGP makes it very difficult to fail in that particular way.
Most people do not use "insecure" in this way. I would venture to say that your usage of "insecure" here is actually incorrect.
Approximately nobody ever does this verification[1], so this distinction is critically important: Signal works out of the box, whereas PGP does not.
Fun fact: it was renamed from fingerprint to safety number after studies showed non-technical users (reasonably) associate the idea of fingerprints with criminal investigations.
[1]: sneak's law: users will not securely manage {=generate, back up, transmit, or, importantly, in this case, authenticate} key material
>Approximately nobody ever does this verification[1], so this distinction is critically important: Signal works out of the box, whereas PGP does not.
Then, say, Telegram in non-secret message mode, is just as secure, in the sense that you have to trust a third party. Not clearly informing the user of this trust is dishonest.
>...after studies showed non-technical users (reasonably) associate the idea of fingerprints with criminal investigations
We would be interested in a reference to one of those studies. "Fingerprint" at least implies something about identity. "Safety" is more obscure. I feel that both are less than optimal here for imparting the important concept to the user. I think that "PGP number" or "Signal number" would be better. There is already preexisting culture around "Phone numbers" and identity.
> Then, say, Telegram in non-secret message mode, is just as secure, in the sense that you have to trust a third party. Not clearly informing the user of this trust is dishonest.
The difference is that if Telegram was intercepting messages, there would never be any indication to users. If Signal did it there would be evidence on the client side, in the form of tampered safety numbers.
We can worry that a user is very unlikely to notice bad safety numbers, but "very unlikely" is much different from "impossible" when it comes to mass surveillance. All it takes is a single public scandal where Signal provably tampered with safety numbers for the whole service to be thrown into question. Not to mention the dramatic surge in user interest in "safety numbers" that would result from such attacks being detected in the wild.
No. Telegram in the default mode is not e2ee and allows Telegram to passively log all messages.
Logging messages under TOFU means you are either actively attacking the users (and they get a message when you stop) or you aren't getting the messages.
Most messages are not first messages. TOFU is valid, as evidenced by years of successful use by SSH.
Protonmail is an app that uses OpenPGP protocol, like signal uses signal protocol. It works out of box. In both cases, both sides need to use the same app.
For most of my conversations, authentication really isn’t an important consideration. If someone snoops the random pics and texts I send back and forth with my friends, so be it.
But it’s awfully nice to use the same app for different communications too, where authentication is important.
Signal has done a fantastic job of nailing that balance, and I appreciate that.
Signal could easily become a mass utility if governements would encourage their citizens to use it. Same with all the fediverse type platforms.
The reason these efforts struggle with unfathomly limited resources while surveillance capitalism doesnt know what to do with their adtech trillions is that governments have sold their citizens short.
The fate of Signal is tied to the fate of democracy.
The way I got some of my coworkers to adopt Signal was when we went to Re:invent as a group, and texting no longer worked reliably. I suggested everyone install Signal, and we didn't have a problem communicating after that. Now everyone still uses it.
It's interesting how temporary solutions to problems can become permanent features of a (small) community.
This approach, unfortunately, won't work in the majority of the (western) world where WhatsApp has already replaced text messages as the de facto standard.
I've been using Matrix (and element as a client) for a little while now for personal and business stuff - I even wrote some fun little bot to shitpost random memes on my behalf.
Anyone else using matrix actively for professional stuff? Any thing I may find later on that is a show stopper?
I believe parts of the French government are using Matrix for their communications [1].
I've been wanting to use Matrix more and more over IRC, but I've never really liked any of the Matrix clients. I think I'm just too stuck in my ways about my favorite IRC clients.
I have spent years using discord, slack and teams now so the migration to element as a client was definitely a welcome change. I like the idea of not having my companys historical communication tied directly to a single vendor and being able to host my own local server (and have options of which).
Not surprised governments are taking a look at it, the encryption and usability
seem like a good fit and don't require them to rely on google/microsoft/salesforce for chatting.
I’ve just generally found the polish in Element lacking - which seems strange to me. I was under the impression a benefit of Electron was you get very nice building blocks with edge cases taken care of.
Signal is great, easily one of the best apps I've ever used. As someone who's privacy conscious, I've been trying forever to get my network of friends, family and colleagues to use signal with literally no success. Here in the UK, WhatsApp is ubiquitous, and to even _think_ of using a different app is, by most laypeople's standards, absolutely weird. Most people I've convinced have downloaded Signal, gave it a go with a few messages, and them promptly went back to WhatsApp because that's where the majority of their communication happens.
I'm convinced that it doesn't matter how good the product is, what matters is the network effect. Nobody cares about privacy, what they care about is whether everyone else is using the same app. Until there's some doomsday scenario of everyones messages getting leaked or something (the closest was the WhatsApp privacy policy changes that triggered worldwide scrutiny and was a general PR nightmare), nobody will be moving en masse to a plucky small app that their network isn't on.
Also doesn't help that Signal are implementing features like crypto transactions that most people don't care about.
> Here in the UK, WhatsApp is ubiquitous, and to even _think_ of using a different app is, by most laypeople's standards, absolutely weird.
Several countries in Europe have already 1/10th of their population using Telegram. Telegram sees more than one million download per quarter in the UK alone.
Telegram is simply a much better app (better UI/UX) and nobody around me finds it weird. As soon as friends and family tries Telegram, they're hooked.
The network effect is already there and I guarantee you that if there still people finding it "weird", it won't last long.
There's also zero problem using both WhatsApp and Telegram (which many people do: I don't but many do).
> The company’s aggressive pursuit of growth, coupled with lack of moderation in the app, has already led Signal employees themselves to publicly question whether growth might come from abusive users, such as far-right groups using Signal to organize.
Lol what? What exactly does far-right mean in this case? Why intersperse irrelevant political digs at another ill-defined faction? Does far-right just mean non-progressive and conservative?
The rising intolerance of wrongthink on the left has been written about extensively but I’d love to read a sympathetic, anthropological investigation into it.
I say sympathetic because I don’t believe you can understand anything without really seeing how a reasonable person could come to those same conclusions.
If you say something incisive to piss people off and trigger a reaction, and you get the reaction you're looking for, what we've established is that you are willing to piss people off to serve your rhetorical ends. Nothing else.
This of the "stop hitting yourself" form of argumentation.
He observed an 'intolerance of wrongthink' and got a reaction where someone was, in fact, intolerant of wrongthink. I don't see how that's anything but a confirmation.
That's a mischaracterization, the comment was pointing out "intolerance of wrong think" on the right. There are other criticisms to be made of that comment (eg it violated the guidelines by devolving into personal attack), but "intolerance of wrong think" isn't one of them.
Even if it were, it wouldn't matter. If I cared to I could construct an equivalent comment baiting right-wingers and declare victory when someone took issue with it.
If you're going to take someone getting pissed off as proof of something, anyone willing to engage in such rhetoric will be able to convince you of anything.
The paradox of tolerance gets you a long way to understanding it, but you will also have to be far more specific if you want answers because practically everyone has limits to what they consider acceptable speech, even if they don't call it that.
Beyond that, there is a pretty concerted effort to elevate minor grievances into the national spotlight to portray the left a certain way, e.g. the Oberlin Cafeteria scandal, where story in the college paper about the quality of the food in their college cafeteria became both a national news story and a symbol of just how deranged the left had become.
Is that actually indicative of anything? Is it something the general public should actually care about? Does it even reflect "the left" as a political body?
I think once you start asking those questions a lot of the "wrongthink" stories (not all!) start seeming a lot closer to college kids complaining about bad food than they are to the sands of politics and free speech shifting underfoot.
People are constantly misapplying The Paradox of Tolerance - which is an argument for protecting free speech in all cases other than one: opposition of free speech.
Somehow that got contorted by modern-day activists into "I can shout down or physically attack people I don't agree with" -- which is exactly opposite of what was being argued by Popper. It's an argument for more permissive expression, not less. He notes that the best path is nearly always rational argumentation of opposing views.
I can't find any textual support for that narrow interpretation of the Paradox of Tolerance in anything that Popper wrote. Where does he say that only opposition to freedom of speech counts as 'intolerance' in the relevant sense?
You'll need to read the book -- if you're looking for a soundbite you're doing yourself a disservice -- it's short anyway. But note that he's talking specifically about argumentation.
The book is a response to Plato, who generally opposed free speech for the masses. In general, Popper strongly disagrees with Plato. And it's important to note that he described of the paradox as he understood it from Plato, but does not necessarily endorse it.
The people suddenly fond of this one footnote might take a moment and read his work anyway, as they may be surprised to read his views on socialism and Marx specifically.
I have read the book. I'm saying that I don’t find any textual support in it for your narrow interpretation of the paradox of tolerance. Under that title it's treated by Popper in one brief and quite vague paragraph. If you think that other parts of the book point to a narrower or more specific version of the paradox of tolerance, then you should at least be able to give some indication of which parts.
Also, he more-or-less does endorse the idea just a little bit beyond the famous paragraph:
>All these paradoxes can easily be avoided if we frame our political demands
the way suggested in section II of this chapter, or perhaps in some such as this.
We demand a government that rules according to the principles of
equalitarianism and protectionism; that tolerates all who are prepared to
reciprocate, i.e. who are tolerant; that is controlled by, and accountable to, the
public.
"We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
The book Open Society and its Enemies is moreso about how an open society cannot truly be tolerant, much in the same way that Herbert Marcuse expresses, in that tolerating dangerous ideas allows them to grow thereby destroying the entire concept of an open tolerant society. It was not specifically about opposition of free speech, that's absurd as even he would recognize that you can't protect free speech from dangerous ideas without being intolerant of those ideas. Hence, the paradox.
So people shouting their enemies aren't doing the opposite of what Popper suggests, they are proof of what he claims. Remember, he viewed socialism as a beautiful dream, but struggled to align that with his views on individual freedom and how reaching such goal would be very difficult without violent means of overthrowing the status quo (these means again infringing on his beliefs of individual freedom).
Even as you describe it (I think you've described Poppler's argument well), it's still bogus. We don't need laws forbidding speech against free speech to protect free speech; the solution to the "paradox" is that there is no paradox. Our system of checks and balances to undo unconstitutional laws works well enough that we don't need to curtail political speech to protect political speech. The system is resilient to speech which criticizes it.
Poppler seems to think that fire must be fought with fire, that's his 'paradox'. He forgets or deliberately discounts the existence of fire extinguishers, e.g. checks and balances.
The paradox of tolerance is the invention of Karl Popper, a member of the Mont Pelerin Society - a hard-right group literally founded by F.A. Hayek. It is a justification for the persecution of collectivists, which mostly meant the persecution of left-wingers at the time. It's the justification of the actions general Pinochet would later undertake.
The only way I can use such a thing to understand left wing thought is by assuming someone is picking and choosing ideas in the pursuit of power . Citing it makes me think of an unconventional medieval priest who tries to justify burning all his enemies at the stake by combining Calvin's inflexible concept of damnation with the Catholic penchant for punishing sinners and heretics.
And the simplest statement of the paradox is "It's OK to persecute and kill collectivists (meaning communists and fascist), because they deny the validity of a universal reason". I assure you it's not an argument that justifies "de-platforming".
>Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
René Girard has done an anthropological investigation of this topic. The gist of it is through the psycho-social mechanism of scapegoating, opposing groups can simultaneously believe they are victims while acting as oppressors, often using their victim status as justification for their oppression of "the other".
Girard explores this phenomenon of scapegoating and postulates it goes back to primitive humans e.g. during a drought tensions rise within a tribe, and a certain "witchy" tribe member is singled out to take the blame and either expelled or murdered. After this, social tensions in the tribe are relieved (even if the drought does not subside), and the scapegoat paradoxically becomes a sacred, or savior, figure. Through history, this develops into ritual and religion. It provides a useful lens to reason about messianic cults, as well as social power dynamics.
There's a good overview on his Wikipedia page, but he delves into this particular topic in the book Violence and the Sacred. He also pioneered the field of Generative Anthropology, which other academics like Eric Gans have built upon, theorizing about the mechanism in much more detail, and using it to explain effects in modern culture.
> The rising intolerance of wrongthink on the right has been written about extensively but I’d love to read a sympathetic, anthropological investigation into it.
> I say sympathetic because I don’t believe you can understand anything without really seeing how a reasonable person could come to those same conclusions.
We are diving deep into the irony of bifurcated political systems where the two groups simultaneously believe themselves to be victims of their opposing teams rather than circumstance and systemic failures.
> The rising intolerance of wrongthink on the left
Basically, people are fed up with general bigotry, racism, misogyny, and the destruction of the environment -- all of which have real life and death consequences for many people. That, combined with polarization, has made people very reactive to which "side" they perceive things to be on.
Of course people are fed up with those things. They also have the ability to organize and make noise about it. That, combined with polarization, as I've said, heightens both the activism and the perception of such activism.
I think polarization is the main cause. Demagogues love to craft an "us vs them" narrative, pose as heroes of the "us" side, and plenty of gullible people fall for it with gusto. Mentally, we're still monkeys who will follow a strong leader without questioning.
Mind you, demagogues are not only politicians, they can be human rights activists, teachers, businessmen, neighbors, etc. Emotion managing should be a mandatory class at basic school, so many of us need to think with our heads instead of our guts.
Proud Boys would be a good example. Not sure why they have to single out the right though. I guess every periodical has to take a stance on politics. The original source just said:
"""
Employees worry that, should Signal fail to build policies and enforcement mechanisms to identify and remove bad actors, the fallout could bring more negative attention to encryption technologies from regulators at a time when their existence is threatened around the world.
“The world needs products like Signal — but they also need Signal to be thoughtful,” said Gregg Bernstein, a former user researcher who left the organization this month over his concerns. “It’s not only that Signal doesn’t have these policies in place. But they’ve been resistant to even considering what a policy might look like.”
"""
> It’s not only that Signal doesn’t have these policies in place. But they’ve been resistant to even considering what a policy might look like.
Could it be that Signal hadn't considered this type of policy because it's in exact opposition to e2e messaging? I swear these government propagandists don't even try to hide their intentions.
Is it not true in technology that either everyone has access to protected communications, or none do?
If the world needs products like Signal, then we just have to accept the inevitable fact that everyone will get products like Signal, or none will. This isn't enriched uranium, it can't be restricted to the few approved.
> This isn't enriched uranium, it can't be restricted to the few approved.
You say this in jest but encryption was export-controlled under ITAR in my lifetime. With the persistent government attacks on encryption increasing in frequency around the world, I wouldn't be surprised if we see more attempts at containing it in ways not unlike the control of enriched uranium.
> You say this in jest but encryption was export-controlled under ITAR in my lifetime.
And then Zimmerman sort of screwed that up, didn't he? I remember, bet we're about the same age.
> With the persistent government attacks on encryption increasing in frequency around the world, I wouldn't be surprised if we see more attempts at containing it in ways not unlike the control of enriched uranium.
Everything possible must be done to thwart such efforts.
"former user researcher" sounds like someone who was a subversive presence at Signal trying to make sure "bad actors" could be disciplined in the service of whatever politics he favors. People shouldn't underestimate that such people are in all the media orgs now and will keep pushing until the surveillance state is pervasive. Wired is just pushing propaganda and cherry-picking quotes to support its pre-determined narrative.
At this current moment in history, in the United States at least, there aren't a lot of armed left wing groups. But right wing paramilitary groups have been on the rise for years, and recently they tried to overturn an election by force.
At a different time in history people would have fretted that the Weather Underground or Black Panthers would be using the app. But we're in 2023 and not 1970, and people are concerned about Proud Boys and Boogaloos.
Far-right or hard-right are terms often used nowadays to refer to any dissident who questions government leadership, the security apparatus, or the war machine. I have learned to ignore these and other labels from the MSM as meaningless. I am not denying that actual fascists exist, but these labels are used to scare us into believing or supporting particular positions such as cracking down on any dissidents.
> Far-right (...) to refer to any dissident who questions government leadership, the security apparatus, or the war machine.
That's factually incorrect. There's anti-authoritarian tendencies both on the right and the left, although right-wing anti-authoritarianism (also called libertarianism) is usually very inconsistent and leads to a paradox of "freedom of oppression/exploitation". Far right never meant anti-State capitalists.
Far-right refers historically to conservative and reactionary political groups, in particular it referred to royalists when the left-right concept was invented after the French revolution.
Nowadays, the term refers specifically to fascists, the political movements who believe in empowering the State to protect and develop Capital. Or as Mussolini put it, « Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power ».
Well there is a huge crackdown on dissidents. However, except for the January 5th crew, it's very clearly not a crackdown against the right, but against the anti-authoritarian left (anarchists) and to some extent the authoritarian left (marxist-leninists) in the US context (see: COINTELPRO, Leonard Peltier, Mummia Abu Jamal...).
With so many trials, arrests and physical assaults against militant ecologists, zadists and anti-racist activists such as in the NODAPL case or against Cop City in Atlanta, it's hard to say the far-left isn't concerned by political repression. On the other hand, with so many terrorist attacks committed by white supremacists on US soil and so little reaction from the establishment, it's very clear that the powers that be are very complacent with the far right.
To go back to lands i know more about, in the EU, islamist attacks are only a few percents of all terrorists attacks. Yet the media only talks about those as if racist militias did not exist. On the other hand, eco-anarchists sabotaging ecocidal industrial projects such as in Notre-Dame-des-Landes or Sainte-Soline get called "eco-terrorists" on every media by the establishment, despite never spilling blood in their actions. And so many comrades rot in jail for daring to believe in a better world.
I'm not saying the term "far-right" can't be misused to misrepresent various (moderate) conservative positions, but claiming it's a rhetorical trick used by those in power to prevent dissent is far from the truth.
The use of anarchism in the title was the first tell. It's an often misused and misunderstood word. I'm confident Wired knows better, but used it because of the pop culture-y biases it is sure to trigger.
This is why we can't have nice things. Why be rational and objective when there a clicks to bait?
It's not clickbait if the actual Signal people claim the anarchist label, like m0xie does. Despite all my political and technical disagreements with him, i must recognize he is an anarchist and it's nice to see for once a press article not trying to wash his political engagement away.
Signal's target is more likely to understand the more true and subtle aspects of the word. But most importantly, Signal doesn't make money from ads. Ads that need eye-balls. So in that context, the word is definitely bait-y.
I understand your point, but as i read the article from Tor Browser using safest mode i had no idea advertisement was involved. I tend to forget people actually place ads in places. Trying to refrain myself from using stronger, more judgy words.
>Far-right politics, or right-wing extremism, refers to a spectrum of political thought that tends to be radically conservative, ultra-nationalist, and authoritarian, often also including nativist tendencies. The name derives from the left–right political spectrum, with the "far right" considered further from center than the standard political right.
Only if you agree that de Santis is, e.g., an ultra-nationalist. And if you do agree that all or most of those points apply to de Santis, then it's hard to see why you'd not agree that he's far right. I mean, who would be far right in that case? Only ultra-ultra-nationalists who are more-than-just-radically conservative?
To be clear, I'm not expressing an opinion here as to whether de Santis is far right. I'm saying that anyone who disagrees that he is will probably also disagree that at least one component of Wikipedia's definition applies to him.
When someone says “far right” they usually mean roughly what the Wikipedia article describes. I don’t see any reason to suppose that the phrase is being used in a novel or unusual sense in the article, so I wonder if the question is being asked rhetorically. But if the poster really just wants to know what “far right” means, then the Wikipedia article explains it.
Wikipedia is pretty notably "far left" in its interpretation of politics. You're asking an ally about your enemy and feeling smug when you hear an echo.
The original question was what “far right” refers to in the article. My assumption is that the Signal employees mentioned had roughly the same thing in mind as the Wikipedia article. You may not like the term “far right” (after all, both “far left” and “far right” are usually used pejoratively), but there is little doubt as to what it means in this context.
I thought, just maybe, they're referring to the groups of openly fascist Americans who attacked the US capitol and organized other violent events. But maybe you're right and "far-right" is meaningless. I don't know why you would be right - it doesn't even make sense to raise the questions you raised, but I supposed we should consider your opinion.
In what sense were the capitol rioters "openly fascist"? I have not seen any meaningful political group in the US trying to own the label; it is only ever applied to political enemies.
> In what sense were the capitol rioters "openly fascist"?
In the sense that they are literally Nazi sympathizers who display Nazi imagery, talk about Nazi ideology, praise Hitler, and write/talk about their racist beliefs influencing their political beliefs. I am not going to dig through these articles for you now and I am not going to respond further because I do not believe you are posting in good faith, but this is for the readers. Look up, like, any article about fascists/Nazis at Jan 6.
> Does far-right just mean non-progressive and conservative?
Don't know what they mean, but to me, "far right" doesn't mean that. It means the most radical extreme of the right. Just like "far left" means the most radical extreme of the left. I'd even argue that the far right is not actually conservative, and the far left is not actually liberal.
That's not how the media and most people see it, unfortunately. Anything remotely mean or intolerant that happens to not be left leaning is auto-labelled far right. It's what I would argue is the silent and unlabeled bias of the media against conservatism.
Heck I'm labeled far-right just for suggesting that affirmative action is racist.
Nobody asked for content moderation, why are they trying to create this complaint out of thin air? If there’s a channel I don’t like, I’ll leave it/unsubscribe.
Many people are calling for moderation, just not the people in the groups to be moderated. The callers don't want to protect the people in the group, they want to protect people from the group they want to moderate.
> Does far-right just mean non-progressive and conservative?
It depends how far you go. Does far-left just mean non-conservative and progressive? There's of course a subjective element to the answer, but there's objective arguments to be had as well, but in a specific context and timeframe.
For example, being opposed to abortion rights was once considered normal except in far-left circles where anarchists such as Emma Goldman or Émilie Lamotte organized clandestine courses and workshops. Half a century ago, it could have been considered mildly conservative to be against abortion rights. Nowadays, with many conservative right-wing voices standing for abortion rights, being against would place you immediately on the far-right ultra-conservative spectrum.
Note that i'm writing this from the french cultural/political context, but i don't think this is true. Or at least it's not universal. Here even most of the far right would not dare question reproductive/abortion rights. Even Marine Le Pen has proposed to make abortion a constitutional right. The only question on the conservative right here (except for marginal catholic sects such as La Manif Pour Tous) is to oppose extending the incubation period during which abortion is legal.
In the United States the situation is different, mostly due to decades of political lobbying and public disinformation against abortion orchestrated by fascist billionaires associated with various christian churches. But still, i'm guessing some parts of the right wouldn't dare question abortion rights. Despite the democrats being from an outsider's perspective a right-wing party (capitalist and rather conservative), let's pretend for a second the republican party are the entirety of the right, it's still not clear that all democrats stand for abortion and all republicans against:
Still, i think there is truth in what you say. As much as some issues such as gay/trans rights have advanced in the past decades, the political spectrum has shifted massively to the right in the Global North. Anti-immigration doctrines are far more common, and abolition of capitalism and wage slavery has almost become a taboo even on the so-called left. It's always both funny and sad to see people call Mélenchon or Sanders "far-left" when their social program is rather centrist and not more ambitious/communist than historically very right-wing programs (such as De Gaulle's after WWII).
Because Wired, and to a lesser extent some Signal employees, have a political agenda to push that they're willing to distort the truth for.
There's zero evidence that Signal is being used for radical reactionary groups any more than radical progressive groups - and if there was evidence, the Signal employees would have very little additional knowledge due to app's design.
As an anarchist I accept that we have literally the worst branding and need to start over.
It’s not by accident of course, but yet it remains true that 99% of people see the word “anarchist” and think about the Anarchist cookbook or teenagers making prank calls and being angsty and throwing the odd Molotov cocktail.
No wonder then these comments are filled with people equivocating between “anti-government” Christi-fascists like the oath keepers and anarcho-communists like members of the DSA.
They couldn’t be further apart, but because both are “anti-government” then people assume it’s all the same cause it’s a binary system conceptually.
You’re either state capitalist or state communist there is no third option (or fourth! How absurd!).
340 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 340 ms ] threadWhat a reflection of the massive political shift from individual liberty and 'all men are created equal', for which privacy is necessary, to compliance with power. Now that's "far out on the political fringe" and even "anarchy"?
I know most people don't think philosophically about it, but Signal's principles are pretty mainstream American (and probably other free countries), afaik - or knew?
EDIT:
> Signal has managed to maintain an unusual focus on the autonomy of the individual, a wariness of state authority, and an aversion to making money, characteristics that are recognizably anarchist.
Doesn't that describe, to different degrees, a great many open source projects? Mozilla? BSDs? etc?
EDIT2:
I think that's what the article really is about: The author's theory that this sort of vision is utopian, very fringe, and therefore impossible.
It's pretty shocking to see it in Wired, which once led in exploring, beliving in, and bringing to the world's (or its readers') attention exceptional innovations well beyond the conceptions of the norm.
Now they doubt such things ipso facto. Nobody seems to remark on the extraordinary reactionary philosophy that is flooding the public space, the antithisis of creativity, freedom, innovation, and 'intellectual curiosity'.
Or a lot of englightenment political theory about democracy and republicanism and the rule of law that all lie at the roots of most modern states?
It's one thing to meet with refutation of this philosophy. It's another thing to meet with the wired article author's incredulity & astonishment at these well established ideas.
But, the thing is, liberals _used_ _to_ espouse free speech as long as it was legal and defended it to the death, so to speak. Conservatives, well, they were conservative and were more on the "decency" argument but today that is reversed and the liberals are tending more autocratic than the conservatives.
Hence the use of the phrase “don’t say gay”
It has nothing to do with sex. Republicans in florida have quite clearly criminalized same sex couples doing normal things.
Because that would be the equivalent.
The children are not the teachers friends. Leave them alone.
I don't care who their partner is, neither does my child. No one cares. Maybe we should ask why government employees aren't keeping stronger boundries when around children?
Also... Seriously? You aren't fooling anyone with these absolutely convoluted hypotheticals. No one is going to jail for saying "that's my <whatever>". It's an weak case when you need to reach outside of reality.
and you do realize that marriage and relationships ARE part of education? history english etc. at what age do kids learn about what a husbands or wife is and what is marriage? because that is the same age they should learn about same sex relationships.
> I don't care who their partner is, neither does my child
lots of people do. lots of parents want their kids to not be exposed to the fact same sex couples exist, hence the don't say gay bill. and afterwards schools pulling all library books because the mere mention of a same sex couple in one is enough for them to be sued under the bill.
you are correct no one will go to jail. but school districts can be sued, which means they will not hire gay teachers because of the simple risk one parent gets upset and racks up a legal bill for them
THAT is why its so bad, how is that so difficult to understand for you?
Interesting, what's a good source on that?
Because, the core of it was to ensure that said 3rd graders knew two things: 1. What the correct anatomical names for their genitals - parts of their bodies - are, and 2. What is appropriate and inappropriate touching.
Now, the reason you want to teach these things to children, really as young as possible, is because it turns out there's been quite a lot of child abuse cases where the defense case has rested on the fact that the victims don't actually know the anatomical names of body parts. And as a result when you go to prosecute, you can't conclusively prove from their testimony what was taking place, which it turns out has a habit of not convincing juries.
A child who only will sort of gesture to the lower part of their body, because they don't know to volunteer the correct name of the body part, again, it turns out, leads to a court system which fails to apply justice properly, and also increases the general risk of abusers being able to operate because they convince their victims that everything that's happening is "okay".
Oh, and as it turns out, it's also very hard to teach children how to identify this sort of thing without touching on the idea of their being multiple sexualities, because of course to teach something like appropriate and inappropriate touching you are quite likely (a) having to service questions from children who'll ask why it's not inappropriate for mommy and daddy, or (b) have to ask what about daddy and daddy or mommy and mommy and (c) who might struggle with the notion if it's not correctly identified that the inappropriate thing will apply regardless of gender, and yet can also be appropriate for adults regardless of gender.
There's a reason no one targeting primary school level physical education classes wants to say anything more then "sex ed" because, if they had to actually cover the content of what they were opposing, they'd rather look they were basically defending child predators. Which, though not directly, they are.
Sex education is just part of the trend.
I mean, there's objective truth here; "he believes is correct" is a distortion of the facts. LGBTQ people actually do exist. Suing a school district and opposing the legislation of a state that's trying to erase classes of people from existence seems like a reasonable thing to do.
The Temecula school district in question decided they wanted to remove gay-rights activist Harvey Milk from the state-approved curriculum. Are we going to be willfully naive (or just flat-out bigoted) and suggest that they wanted to do that for any reason other than not wanting their kids to know homosexuality exists?
In the case of Florida, if teachers are allowed to discuss heterosexual relationships (even just simply talking about "mom and dad") in the classroom (which of course they are), legally requiring that they pretend homosexual relationships don't exist seems a bit absurd, no?
I'm not buying any of this as liberals trying to restrict free speech. If anything, it's the opposite: what if teachers wanted to teach the material the Temecula school board decided they wanted removed? What if teachers in Florida don't want to be afraid that they just might say something about a homosexual relationship and get fired?
Was there legislation? If not, how was it "banned"?
No, this is absurd. You don't get to imagine injustices by "the left" just because you don't like them. Right now the right is actively censoring teachers as private individuals. Where is this happening from left wing politicians?
Mitigations are now everywhere. I can’t watch a video of Elon Musk explaining how new Tesla cars will start up by recognizing specific patterns in the driver’s testicles without a big warning telling me that the video is AI-generated.
Funnily enough, the absolute best content tends to be the stuff with fact checker warnings.
> Although the content the EARN IT Act seeks to regulate is abhorrent and the government’s interest in stopping the creation and distribution of that content is compelling, the First Amendment still requires that the law be narrowly tailored to address those weighty concerns. Yet, given the bill’s broad scope, it will inevitably force online platforms to censor the constitutionally protected speech of their users. (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/earn-it-act-violates-c...)
The Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act of 2020 (EARN IT Act) amends an existing federal law to force online platforms into changing how they moderate content online by scanning and censoring more of their users’ communications. (https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/the-earn-it-act-is-a-d...)
If it’s hard for a provider to tell what’s unlawful, but it’ll face legal liability if it gets it wrong, then the obvious incentive is for the provider to avoid the danger zone and censor lots of lawful content along with the unlawful content, just in case. This is exactly why Section 230 immunity is so important, because without it, platforms would constantly censor a lot of legal speech by their American users – maybe your speech – as a byproduct of trying to censor illegal speech, for fear that if they didn’t cast a wide net, some illegal speech would slip through and they’d get sued for it. (https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2020/03/earn-it-act-uncon...)
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/government-...
That's banana republic level technique and tactics. This is something a Francisco Franco might have done. No, no, we don't have censors, we're just making sure only the truth of the moment is published. And of course, blackhole all the contradictions.
What other truths are you struggling to publish? What contradictions do you have that you're unable to display anywhere?
> Federal embeds counselling companies on content
What's this? I haven't heard about it.
The essence of freedom of speech has always been the ability of the common or marginalized folk to discuss and criticize those with power and privilege - the state, the landed, the majority. Attacking marginalized minorities is not the purpose of it and is a categorically different type of action - the marginalized don't have power over others to begin with.
Frustratingly the US is actually rather poor about expression freedom in a number of other ways (ways which ironically almost never come up when Americans talk about speech freedoms), and ranks below many other western nations.
If you make this the principle according to which you allow or censor speech, the predictable outcome is that would-be speakers will seek to establish that they are common and marginalized (or speaking for those who are) and their opponents have power and privilege (or work on behalf of those who are), as in a classical bravery debate (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debate...). In general, the powerful and privileged tend to be the ones who win these contests.
In fact, it is the fascist right that want to remove privacy, has passed laws (like PATRIOT) to do so, and the supporters simply say “if you don’t want to be spied on, then what are you hiding”
The right wing are the ones actively pushing this along with “if you think privacy is a right, then you are a predator. Won’t someone think of the children?!”
> "There has not been a liberal push away from encryption."
Pointing out Democratic congresspeople who push away from encryption does not contradict wredue's claim. Liberal is not a party affiliation, when Democratic congresspeople push away from liberal principles they are being illiberal. Liberal doesn't mean "whatever it is that Democratic politicians support".
And yes, I know this is confusing to Americans who received their political education from AM talk radio or cable television, who's understanding of the term amounts to "whatever it is that Democratic politicians say." When a Democratic politician calls for violent lyrics in rap music to be banned (as some did in the 90s), that is illiberal. When a Republican says that abortion should be legal, that is liberal. Even though liberal values are generally associated more with one party than the other, that doesn't mean liberalism is nothing more than party affiliation.
It’s not that far of a shift (at least from the 90s Clinton admin).
https://archive.epic.org/crypto/clipper/
> there’s been a cultural shift in the liberal establishment over the years away from protecting speech, even hateful speech to actively espousing and advocating for censorship
The shift is to protecting the rights of people oppressed by hate speech, in the balance between its speakers and victims. It's based on the idea that the politically vulnerable have their rights - including their free speech - abridged by hate speech. It says hate speech censors the politically vulnerable, so at some points, we must censor one or the other.
It's tricky, but portraying it as 'anti-free-speech' is like portraying 'pro-life' advocates as 'anti-personal-rights'. If we're honest then it's not that simple, whatever one's perspective.
I'm not sure how E2EE is implicated: If the speech isn't heard by the politically vulnerable, it's much less likely to be oppressive; if someone texts me hate speech over Signal, the encyrption doesn't matter. If it's a plan of violence, that's of course a different and existing issue.
> I get downvoted for having an opinion not totally in lock step with the social-liberal worldview.
The victim routine degrades the credibility of your comment. It looks like someone just following standard right-wing rhetoric. Also, you don't offer convincing evidence.
"Hate speech" is not defined in US law. Hate speech -- however one chooses to define it, outside of threats and incitements to violence -- is not illegal.
Hate crimes are a different story.
I've been applauding deplatforming and censorship of racist hate groups for years now, but more recently I've started becoming a bit worried that we're falling into a bizarro-world version of Niemoeller's "First they came for the socialists...".
On one hand I am worried that we are devolving to a state where no one is allowed to express an opinion that might just offend some hypothetical person, somewhere, even if no one can actually find that person. And on the other I worry that deplatforming shitty people doesn't actually fix all that much, and can often make matters worse.
On one hand I am worried that we are devolving to a state where no one is allowed to express an opinion that might just offend some hypothetical person, somewhere, even if no one can actually find that person."""
Remember that any party that would want to stifle speech could easily pay a third party to claim to be offended by speech.
To be clear I am not talking about the heckler's veto, where someone tries to actively interfere with the reception of someone's speech
It depends what they say. If they say 'advocate for yourself and we'll lynch you', it does effectively censor you.
Can you link to anything that actually backs up that claim of yours?
A business choosing not to do business with you, even in very specific and obtuse ways is not censorship. A private entity has no legal, ethical, or moral obligation to signal boost or publish anything they do not want to.
Also, language is not harmful. It may be abusive or offensive but it's not harmful. That's not to say people don't allow themselves to become affected by language --but one can be negatively affected by lots of language that isn't "hateful" but may be truthful or carry unwanted information.
Furthermore, language is demonstrably harmful by way of the weight we've given it over the years. We've also made strides in society in recognizing how to avoid using or enabling it in ways that harm marginalized groups.
This isn't rocket science.
More accurate to say the establishment shifted away from liberalism.
In weaponry, it's taken ~200 years to go from bespoke muskets with a firing rate of a couple rounds per minute to semi-automatic and automatic weapons capable of firing multiple rounds per second.
In just the last 20-30 years we've gone from "if the government wants to know your speech, they are a warrant(-ish) away from getting it" to "as long as you don't make a mistake, no one will ever know what you said."
To be clear, I'm not advocating for encryption restrictions. I'm just saying that almost no one advocates for the 2nd amendment right to a bazooka, and it could reasonably be argued that a bazooka isn't remotely equivalent to the present ability of just about anyone to conceal their speech.
This isn't necessarily true. To believe that the 2nd amendment allows the right to carry a concealed weapon basically anywhere sort of requires one to believe every citizen has the right to carry any weapon. The amendment is meant to indicate that congress simply can't regulate whether citizens choose to own and carry around weapons, and what sort of weapons those might be. If the weapon could be considered an "arm," it can't be regulated.
This is one of the obvious modern flaws with the USA constitution and why the 2nd amendment should be abolished before any reasonable gun control can happen in the USA. Kavanaugh and other justices right now seem to think that there are "of course" conditions and restrictions that should be allowed, like not carrying guns into "sensitive places" or not allowing felons to have guns, but a future justice can simply disagree, and that's that.
Also, many people in the USA believe they should be allowed to have a bazooka.
People use exactly the same arguments you’re making to justify speech restrictions.
It’s my belief that there’s an underlying social pathology wherein some people are happy to hand power to the state in order to feel safe, regardless of the ultimate consequences, whether we’re discussing arms or speech or any other fundamental right.
If the government recedes to a level of totalitarianism wherein you must use your guns to protect your way of life, there's been absolute failures on uncountable levels, and guns won't fix anything. If you threaten to use your gun to destabilize the authoritarian government, they have five hundred ways to kill you easily from a distance. "But guerrilla warfare!" If you're stockpiling guns so as to be one day be a guerrilla, why not instead just take action now to prevent your government becoming that way, by voting for more progressive leaders, participating in protests, and engaging in civil disobedience and disruption?
I don't disagree with the general idea of restricting the ability of government to control personal freedoms to a certain degree, but it doesn't make any sense to me why we like to use the government to regulate what companies are allowed to put in the food they sell us, but not regulate what kind of guns our neighbors can own.
Also free states exist outside of the USA, so clearly those amendments are not a prerequisite of freedom.
I also wouldn't call it a pathology in the average case, not unless you believe there is no use for law, courts, police etc, and are a proponent of anarchy.
One thing that always amused me to death is how firearms are banned from the Republican convention.
Even with plastic explosives, basically anybody who isn't a fugitive, convicted felon or a drug user is allowed to get a federal license for explosives.
I guess it comes down to how you define "arms" and I'm not a constitutional scholar. So: you do you, enjoy your tank :-)
And if you haven't seen it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_(film)
No one has the right to dictate the manner in which I communicate with another individual, contending that it doesn't cause network problems (such as the FCC and radio band restrictions. And to the point, I believe the ban of cryptographic communication on public radio channels to be unlawful and unethical)
I knew absolutely no privacy during most of my childhood. Many times I did not even have a door to my room. Every single bit of privacy I did attain was an act of defiance. Even owning an email address was against the rules of my household, but if I hadn't protected my right to do so and to conceal the act of doing so, I wouldn't be here today as an engineer discussing the merits of privacy on the internet with you.
God forbid what an entire organization of narcissists and control freaks can accomplish when given legal blessing.
As an aside, you might find it interesting that cryptography was actually classified as munitions in the United States at one point, so the analogy does have merit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars
If the state is suspicious of you then they can come over, break in, tie you up, search all your stuff, and take anything they like home with them. It sounds infuriating but it’s what we need in order for the state to catch villains and the crucial part is they can only do it with a warrant.
If a judge ordered you to unlock your phone and hand over all your messages, you’d probably be sour but you should also be morally ok with complying.
Obviously there might be unsolved issues around a) preventing such a system from decaying over time and b) providing some sort of mechanism for people born into a governing society they do not agree with to travel to another society without unachievable economic hurdles. This of course too has limits.
I do differ with you in that I do not believe another entity has the right to compel anyone to do anything. The judge can take my phone, but if it's locked, I cannot be compelled to produce a password. This is established by the fifth amendment, but would probably be better formalized today in a new constitution.
This isn't true, if you're talking about the USA. Within 100 miles of a border, CPB and homeland security can conduct warantless searches, without probable clause. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Martinez-Fuer...
This range includes the all but one of the largest American cities.
That's just the law, though. Functionally and practically speaking, the cops can break in and kill you without a warrant, and do so frequently. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06/05/policekillings/ They can also kill your dog, and frequently do https://aldf.org/project/dogs-shot-by-cops/
You shouldn't be even compelled to help the government convict your loved ones, much less yourself. The government has enough money, powers and people at its disposal, why should they be allowed to be lazy and strongarm you into helping them against your vital interests?
Go far enough in that direction and you'll end up with show trials.
But now it's more like dictatorship and police controlling opinions, which, when it happens in non-western-aligned countries, we all agree that is a really bad thing.
Nobody has a right to snoop on other people's communication. Not even people wearing robs and wigs.
No. It is not my moral obligation to obey the orders of other human beings. Ever.
If you want this to be a moral issue you must first prove that there is a moral basis for compliance and I've yet to hear one. Pointing a gun to my face and telling me what to do doesn't sound moral to me. You can ask. Nicely.
If you want to actually live outside of society, perhaps the only way to do that is on a simple sailboat like Moxie did for a while:
https://archive.org/details/holdFastADocumentaryByMoxieMarli...
But even that only works temporarily because eventually something breaks or runs out, and you will be re-confronted by reality (some society somewhere) once ashore. For example your hypothetical phone unlock is what happened to Moxie. From Wikipedia:
"While entering the U.S. on a flight from the Dominican Republic in 2010, Marlinspike was detained by federal agents for nearly five hours, all his electronic devices were confiscated, and at first agents claimed he would only get them back if he provided his passwords so they could decrypt the data. Marlinspike refused to do this, and the devices were eventually returned, though he noted that he could no longer trust them, saying, "They could have modified the hardware or installed new keyboard firmware."
source: https://www.wired.com/2010/11/hacker-border-search/
The social contract is the only contract in the world that you can be legally bound to the terms of without ever having agreed to it. In this way, the government acts very much like any other organized crime group: "follow the rules we create or else".
Sure you can -- just head off to https://www.thecollector.com/bir-tawil-unclaimed-land/ and enjoy your isolation!
I didn’t say you can live outside of society peacefully in such a way that everyone will just leave you alone but a life of crime is a choice available to everyone.
People for whom the system offers no advantages are far more likely to make that choice.
My original point is that the current state of the law is not some grand moral absolute, it’s just how things happen to have worked out based on a bunch of decisions made by a bunch of people.
You can choose how to react to that up to and including breaking the law. The degree to which you do that can determine your consequences.
Also sometimes the bear eats you and you’re just unlucky.
Try "impossible". No person reading HN is prepared to forgo all of what civilization provides. There are probably a very few people on the planet, who are already living in an extremely isolated tribal setting, who could go it alone, but if they're reading HN I hope they'll speak up now, I'd love to hear their opinion on this.
The clear implication of your original statement was that it is possible to not owe society anything by not taking anything from others. To do that requires a level of self-sufficiency that only a very small fraction of people possess.
“For many, society doesn't provide any advantages and so they choose non-compliance and all the consequences that come with it.”
So what I mean is you can choose to live outside of society, meaning not complying with laws. That is lawlessness, it’s a life of crime.
Living as a sovereign citizen outside of any legal structure in such a way that you neither depend on any legal structure nor do you infringe upon any legal structure is very difficult, and available only to a very small number of people.
But anyone can choose lawlessness at any time.
If you are prepared to live without everything "other human beings" offer you, then sure -- but you're not prepared to do that. So you must reach some sort of agreement with "other human beings" even if that means obeying the occasional "order".
I don't obey their orders. If I cooperate with another entity I do so on my own terms. I am only morally accountable to myself and must reckon with any consequences of my actions that might reflect harm upon me. I have agency.
So yes, I must operate in an ordered system but at no point am I morally obligated to another actor.
Couldn't people just talk quietly and nobody would ever know what they said to each other? Humanity has survived how long under this condition?
The difference was they had to be actively targeting you beforehand, and it was an ongoing high expense per target. Now we bulk collect data on the basis that someone might be guilty in the future
The ability to have a private conversation that remains a secret forever is a fundamental human right that goes back a hundred thousand years.
The argument in favor of private communications is in fact predicated on this: no one can actually cause damage just by communicating. Damage might happen as a result of it, but there is no information so dangerous that the transmission of it must be known up front, and should be pre-emptively scanned for and alerted on. There is always a chain of additional activities and actions which is required for harm to eventuate.
To be clear, I 100% believe that self defense is also intrinsic to being a mobile animal, and everyone has the right to be their own first line of self defense. But most people go their entire lives without needing to defend their self, but nobody goes more than a few days without needing to communicate with someone, often somewhat intimately. The amount of words someone generates is staggering, and if archived arbitrarily, can almost certainly be used against them.
The speaker is telling you what they're going to do - everything else is a formality. Your problem began well before they had a sentence, and wouldn't end if they didn't have one.
I think it's interesting that all of these discussions imply that there is nothing essential about the right to self defense [even from governments] using the most effective tools possible.
Same. The purpose of kinetic weaponry -- even when used in self defense -- is to injure and kill.
Communications encryption has so many varied uses, there's just no comparison.
Those in power and their sycophants fear both of them enough to launch entire propaganda campaigns on their own citizens to restrict them.
Said another way, if you want to analogize e2e encryption to a bazooka, then the government being able to read all of your private communications seems to be the equivalent of having someone constantly violating the fourth (remember that one?) amendment in your house, 24/7.
In any case, my point was about the ability of civilians to conceal, surveillance is only relevant in its inability to keep up.
To your main point, it's important to understand that most people don't feel the need to conceal their conversations from the government. Note: this is not an "if you're not doing crime, what do you need to hide?" argument. I'm just stating the fact that the reason the government can surveil so much information is because people don't choose to encrypt their communications. If they did, the government would have access to very little. Until/unless they set up cameras and microphones everywhere.
It has never been easier for the government to access your speech because never before has such a large portion of speech been recorded.
Police 30 years ago would kill for the data they have access to now. Encryption slightly slows down how quickly the amount of information they have access to is growing, but it can't remotely complete with how quickly the amount of available information is growing.
It's really only just the US being an outlier here. There's no other western country where people think it's normal or a fundamental right to carry automatic weaponry.
I therefore cannot see the comparison to encrypted communication. Everyone communicates, increasingly through software. To keep things that once were private private, encryption is a key ingredient.
Not sure what your point is.
(Also, the production of new automatic weapons for the civilian market has been illegal since 1986, and civilian ownership of automatic weapons is heavily regulated).
Warrants are still a thing! The government in the US can still get a warrant and they can compel you to show them the contents of your Signal messages. No fancy E2E backdoors are required. ;-)
It’s also not clear that the US government can compel you to reveal a password, much less compel you to incriminate yourself.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/11/29/fbi-n...
https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/police-should-n...
This idea is distinct from search and covert eavesdropping powers, which may have also existed at common law but perhaps not under that same principle?
I'm just reacting to the notion that we've departed from the principles of the founders by giving law enforcement access to evidence. My impression, from the bit of reading I've done, is that wouldn't have shocked the conscience of the founders at all.
As for what’s mainstream American, people disagree. Historically, we’re a pretty unruly people. Still are, sometimes. But here is the Fourth Amendment:
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
(Emphasis added.) You can argue about whether that should also apply to secure online communications, but the idea that there are compromises between state power and individual rights is pretty fundamental to US law.
I haven’t researched it, though.
That doesn't mean the violations are acceptable, of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications
This is quite different from almost every prior form of social system in human history and it's arguably the single largest idea which has contributed to lifting humanity out of poverty, war, oppression and misery (the scientific method is a very close competitor for that distinction, but without permanent revolution most scientists probably would have been burned at the stake or ignored).
There will always be people - the powerful, the entrenched, and maybe just the ill-informed, cowardly or intellectually lazy - who are terrified by the notion of permanent revolution, so to them it's radical. (One wonders what camp this writer falls in, because usually journalists are well aware of this stuff, for many it's their raison d'etre. Has this one taken a civics class? Do they believe Jefferson was arguing for anarchy? If so have they looked up the definition of that word in a dictionary?)
But despite the fears of those people, permanent revolution is the secret sauce modern society is built upon. Western civilization has a long line of prominent thinkers and historical examples which has led to this way of organizing ourselves. It is precious and it is still new and if we lose it we might never get it back again.
Anyway, I like the argument that Signal's CEO makes here [1], which is that for virtually all of human history, privacy has been the default. The Constitution was written before the invention of the telegram. At that point in history you could always go into a room alone with someone else, have a conversation, and be reasonably assured that the conversation was private. Bugs and wires didn't exist. Wiretapping didn't exist, surveillance didn't exist unless you had a third human physically present.
This makes privacy akin to a natural right, something we have always had, that we are entitled to by nature of being human. I'm of the view that the US needs a Constitutional amendment to protect it, and if any government seeks to deny it we should give them a reminder of what permanent revolution is and show them how it works.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E--bVV_eQR0
My mum told me "it was an oppressive government". When I asked to elaborate she said "they used to read people's mails so that they knew whom to arrest."
In italy you can end up in jail if you open mails… and yet somehow we are completely ok with the government reading every electronic communication?
That’s fine — it’s what editorial is after all — but it could have been made clearer.
I was hoping to maybe be able to skirt around it, but I think it's unavoidable to discuss this without explicitly saying: the concerning part is that it's increasingly the left doing this. When I was younger I used to be able to rely on that side of the spectrum to be at the forefront of calling out creeping authority like that, which should be unsurprising, given their core philosophy. Yet in the past 5 or so years they seem determined to throw that away and declare that a healthy distrust of the government is in fact a right-wing-exclusive thing, for some reason. Strange self-sabotage, and especially strange when it manifests as people of that affiliation implicitly (or explicitly) praising alphabet agencies
I think Signal implies that you always know and are comfortable with the person on the other side of the message, but that is not always the case.
Once you acknowledge that incredible achievement that nobody else got close to previously, you can then criticise anything you think could have been done better. Or could be improved in the future.
I know when I do it I'm doing something similar to criticising Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's execution of his skyhook and that is a reasonable thing to acknowledge, even when I'm 100% sure that my criticism is legitimate.
I've seen way too many signal users who had no idea this data collection was even happening which is a good sign that Signal isn't very trustworthy. If you're going to promote yourself to whistleblowers and activists, they need to know what data you're collecting and what their risks are, but ever since Signal started collecting all this data they've refused to update their privacy policy which even now starts with "Signal is designed to never collect or store any sensitive information." which is an outright lie. I'm pretty sure at this point it's a dead canary warning people not to trust the service. They've been very unclear in their communications about the data collection too.
They've removed features people loved (the ability to get secure communications and unsecured SMS/MMS in a single app) and they've pushed weird crypto features nobody asked for, which might be another sign they're trying to encourage users to leave the platform, but I sure see them come up a lot in the news. Signal seems to get a lot of promotion. At this point though, people looking for secure communication might want to look for something else.
For more info see:
https://community.signalusers.org/t/proper-secure-value-secu...
https://community.signalusers.org/t/dont-want-pin-dont-want-...
https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/htmzrr/psa_disablin...
Matrix - Introduction: September 2014
I know a lot happened in August of 2014, but I doubt it qualifies as a generation.
The article seems to be trying to say that anarchist values are the root of Signal, but this is a barrier to pragmatism or general adoption.
It describes anarchism, or, the principles of it that Marlinspike adopted (which aren't inherently anarchist. Though Marlinspike is of course an anarchist), as "far out on the political fringe." It says explicitly "sticking to anarchism would imply an almost certain defeat." It implies Marlinspike agrees by dropping his quote on anarchist failure.
However, in the quoted article from Marlinspike, he absolutely doesn't imply something being anarchist relegates it to failure. From his article https://moxie.org/stories/promise-defeat/
> Anarchists are best known for their failures... And yet, far from trying to suppress these histories, these are the stories that anarchists recount. ... This is unusual. American Patriots do not speak, with a gleam in their eyes, of the incredible number of battles that George Washington lost (and he lost almost as much as anarchists do). ... The difference between the ways Nationalists and Anarchists talk about their histories seems critical.
> Will there ever be a night — one glorious evening — when the world is won? Where suddenly civilization, the spectacle, class, racism, and patriarchy all simultaneously topple and remain in ruins? ... It seems unlikely to happen in one moment. ... The George Washingtons of the world offer success. This is based on "realism" and the logic of quantifiability, where it is necessary to make compromises, pass laws, and assert control. Because these are the things that can be won; this is where success is found.
> Anarchy, by contrast, offers us defeat. ... Anarchists are such failures because, really, there can be no victory. Our desires are always changing with the the context of our conditions and our surroundings. What we gain is what we manage to tease out of the conflicts between what we want and where we are. ... Remember that success is a word used to measure. It describes dollars made, people counted, votes cast. In other words, it's a swindle. The rejection of quantification, the emphasis on the role of the individual, is what makes anarchism unique.
By my interpretation, the article is pulling a George Washington, trying to quantify the success of anarchism-in-software, or perhaps private communication, to whether signal can "go mainstream."
> For an idealistic engineer to succeed, he will have to build something that is useful to many.... Signal’s success depends on maintaining its principled anarchist commitments while finding a wide-ranging appeal to the masses
No, Signal is already successful, it's probably already achieved Marlinspike's goal of actualizing a "normal" way to do end to end encrypted private communication (and made it easy for his friends to do so), and it's absolutely achieved the general philosophical goal, through the popularity of the protocol, of giving people the chance to be in control of their surroundings.
If Signal "fails," I guess by not growing its userbase more, the anarchist solution is to build again for whatever the new context is. The Win is there, we'd have the memories of Signal, it existed and let us maintain control of our surroundings if even only briefly.
Example:
> Signal also doesn’t do a good job serving some of its core users. Activists and organizers deal with huge amounts of messages that involve many people and threads, but Signal’s interface lacks ways to organize all this information.
The solution is build again. Or, squat. If people can find a way to make Slack work to organize an antifascist protest, even if it means trading end to end encryption, then, that's a win.
Sell "Signal for Business" accounts or something so I can stop having my bank or local government depend on SMS to communicate with me. I know a number of doctors who'd really love to be able to use Signal to talk to their patients (and would tell them to install it) if it was possible to sanely integrate with it from their practice management software.
As it is, Signal lives in the same space that every other "free" internet service does - if you're not the customer, you're the product. And we get to just wait till that bill comes due.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
That’s incredibly lazy and I hope Signal will find something more ambitious.
I was against WhatsApp for Business until I had to use it to communicate with Virgin Atlantic. It was so much better than getting on the phone to call them! It probably took longer overall whilst waiting an hour or two between replies, but having a history of the conversation and knowing there's someone reading my request in full and replying properly was great.
I dont know why Signal are wasting their time with cryptocurrency projects, whilst the normal app seems pretty stagnant. I'd love a 3rd party API or bot system that was done in a tasteful and private way, but I dont believe there are any plans for it.
Imo, the real risk to Signal will come from partisan and intelligence linked agitators from academia taking over its board and stacking the project with people who will add back doors, or acquiesce to state meddling. The more formal and complex the organization becomes the more likely it will be infiltrated and subverted. It's worth having a 5-10 year horizon for planning privacy tech - and organizing to make the arms race in it less necessary by reining in the agencies who threaten it.
I'm optimistic about the bluesky protocol, and what twitter may become, but without mitigating the official powers of privacy's antagonists, it's just a toy distraction. If you aren't using privacy tools to form networks and organize to preserve privacy, the tools only enable timidity.
This is why I was suggesting in another thread that Signal should preemptively pull out of the UK in response to their crypto legislation, as hiding from these people is just a substitute for action.
It wasn’t copied from Signal — at the protocol level, it is Signal:
https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp/
Like, prove to me Facebook isn't logging and storing every single cryptographic key generated in that entire protocol. Oh, you can't because the entire app is closed source? And you just blindly trust that Facebook is doing the right thing and not decrypting every message to scour it for every bit of information possible?
lol.
Quite the opposite, they start with techniques they work on the binary and only use the source (if available) as a helpful reference. Hiding back doors in source has a long and storied history so relying on it to audit security has long been out of favor.
It could be very well obfuscated.
Second: when you read source code, do you start at the lexicographic first .c file and just read downwards? No? Neither do reversers.
I've reverse engineered file types. But not actual code.
On the other hand, maybe your binary can be decompiled to source code (e.g. CFR can decompile java classes, I've used that a bit but haven't checked if that's useful for Android apps).
Maybe this was bad advice, this approach is like trying to learn a spoken language by listening to a recording and looking up each word at a time. Probably it'd be better to get a deep understanding of how CPUs work in general, I can recommend the book Computer Organization and Design by Hennessy and Patterson for this. I agree with the other commenter that 15 years is more realistic so maybe just start by getting a 4 year degree in CompSci (and that book will probably be required reading).
All in all with 15yrs of training you can start the task :D
What you say can be true if source is readable and well written and you have somehow a guarantee that source is not modified before publishing the app. Or if you just are inexperienced with auditing the app other than reading the code (I know I am).
If we're interested in whether WhatsApp's developers have implemented the Signal protocol in good faith, because we suspect they have not (we suspect they've put in backdoors at the behest of bad governments), then having the source available (and reproducible builds to use) allows us to check that more easily than analysis on the binary's behavior.
This is because the primary way the duplicitous maintainers would do this is in their own source. It's possible (and for three letter agencies probably common and desirable) to deliberately introduce bugs in dependencies that provide the desired behavior in some end product, but it probably shouldn't be our base case. Our base case should be: you swear your code implements the Signal protocol without backdoors...ok, great, you show us the code.
Does Signal itself even have reproducible builds?
They are fully entitled to do that of course, as it is their system. But that makes it far less useful for hobbyists.
That prior technology, by the way, PGP, is not and was never universally hated. Many businesses continue to use PGP today to exchange encrypted communications with suppliers and customers. It's mostly file transfers, but some businesses even support secure email via PGP, and it's been integrated into a modern secure email product from a Swiss company, Proton, targeted at both consumers and businesses.
Also false. XMPP OTR existed long prior.
Should I not have edited "How" back into the title?
(the usual answer)
Since a long time that is known how Signal was initially sponsored by Radio Free Asia, which in turn is fueled by the CIA. For some reason western pages are disappearing on this topic, but after some search there are still some: https://greatgameindia.com/how-cia-created-signal-messenger-...
Then comes the development of the algorithm itself. Moxei invited more crypto experts to write the algorithm while surfing in Hawaii. Quite strange of a chouse and zero details how those trips were sponsored but would know by "coincidence" what else is headquartered in Hawaii? NSA.
Last but not least comes WhatsApp. With a billion users decides almost overnight to switch to the algorithm developed by this relatively unknown and smallish group called Signal. I'm not even observing how mainstream media is invariably supporting Signal with positive news while Telegram is negatively pictured.
All these "signals" (that is an intelligence term btw), plus the fact of closed source code should be enough to raise eyebrows. But nope, you will see a sea of pedantic answers and downvoting whenever pointing the facts. Don't worry, you are not alone.
The problem with Signal (and anything like Signal) is not the server code, but the client code distributed through app stores. We have had email encryption for decades without ever having to trust any email servers.
Also, did you know that Signal is distributed through multiple channels? The iOS App Store, Google Play, F-Droid, as well as directly through Signal's website. Given this, how could they target an individual with tampered binaries in a way that they couldn't notice? Seems pretty hard to me.
Note that Signal is specifically not allowed to be distributed outside of their own apk download and Google/Apple. They have made that repeatedly clear and will take measures against such distribution.
Security is not a scalar. It is probably better for the mass audience but worse if your adversaries includes Google employees.
Take note of your threat model. From what we know of three letter agencies, they probably won't bother. They prefer spyware-like control of the end device. That way they don't need to target the encryption of individual apps, it is far more effective to collect communications after it is decrypted and read by the target.
However, looking at history you find cases that went for decades to targeted individuals/govs. For example: https://web.archive.org/web/20080202225034/http://www.inteld...
With the exception of F-Droid, all options you mention cooperate closely with the US security agencies. In case you were not aware, some years ago in Germany you'd see Apple and the local government sending targeted updates for OSX laptops to be tracked.
But people are voting... Telegram had 700 million users at the beginning of 2023. I think the reason Telegram is constantly negatively pictured has nothing to do with Signal: it is because it is an actual threat to WhatsApp's dominance.
Regarding the supposed benefits of Signal: this thing is collecting metadata left and right. And metadata are much more important than the content of the messages themselves.
I simply don't trust Signal.
I don't trust Telegram either but at least Telegram doesn't pretend and, well, Telegram is actually used by my family and friends.
The only guarantee we have is the difficulty for western authorities to intercept communications from western citizens there.
In fairness to PGP, Signal uses exactly the same method as PGP does for verifying identities. You need to check a ridiculously long number which represents your correspondent's identity. It's a 40 digit hex "key fingerprint" in the case of PGP and a 60 digit decimal "safety number" in the case of Signal. The difference is that Signal will cheerfully let the user have an insecure conversation before the user has verified the safety number. PGP makes it very difficult to fail in that particular way.
Signal has a separate safety number for each of your devices. So it makes it significantly harder to keep up with the user verification than with PGP which has a single key fingerprint per user.
So you could totally have a Signal identity party for exactly the same reasons as in the PGP case...
OpenGPG, the the most commonly used implemention of OpenPGP, doesn't have QR codes because it's meant to be a cli and a library.
With an open standard different clients will have different client facing features.
It should be left to the nerds.
An ideal to aspire but many will use for things worst than porn.
Most people do not use "insecure" in this way. I would venture to say that your usage of "insecure" here is actually incorrect.
Approximately nobody ever does this verification[1], so this distinction is critically important: Signal works out of the box, whereas PGP does not.
Fun fact: it was renamed from fingerprint to safety number after studies showed non-technical users (reasonably) associate the idea of fingerprints with criminal investigations.
[1]: sneak's law: users will not securely manage {=generate, back up, transmit, or, importantly, in this case, authenticate} key material
Then, say, Telegram in non-secret message mode, is just as secure, in the sense that you have to trust a third party. Not clearly informing the user of this trust is dishonest.
>...after studies showed non-technical users (reasonably) associate the idea of fingerprints with criminal investigations
We would be interested in a reference to one of those studies. "Fingerprint" at least implies something about identity. "Safety" is more obscure. I feel that both are less than optimal here for imparting the important concept to the user. I think that "PGP number" or "Signal number" would be better. There is already preexisting culture around "Phone numbers" and identity.
The difference is that if Telegram was intercepting messages, there would never be any indication to users. If Signal did it there would be evidence on the client side, in the form of tampered safety numbers.
We can worry that a user is very unlikely to notice bad safety numbers, but "very unlikely" is much different from "impossible" when it comes to mass surveillance. All it takes is a single public scandal where Signal provably tampered with safety numbers for the whole service to be thrown into question. Not to mention the dramatic surge in user interest in "safety numbers" that would result from such attacks being detected in the wild.
How would the user prove that a particular device never existed?
Logging messages under TOFU means you are either actively attacking the users (and they get a message when you stop) or you aren't getting the messages.
Most messages are not first messages. TOFU is valid, as evidenced by years of successful use by SSH.
But it’s awfully nice to use the same app for different communications too, where authentication is important.
Signal has done a fantastic job of nailing that balance, and I appreciate that.
The reason these efforts struggle with unfathomly limited resources while surveillance capitalism doesnt know what to do with their adtech trillions is that governments have sold their citizens short.
The fate of Signal is tied to the fate of democracy.
It's interesting how temporary solutions to problems can become permanent features of a (small) community.
Anyone else using matrix actively for professional stuff? Any thing I may find later on that is a show stopper?
I've been wanting to use Matrix more and more over IRC, but I've never really liked any of the Matrix clients. I think I'm just too stuck in my ways about my favorite IRC clients.
[1]: https://element.io/case-studies/tchap
Not surprised governments are taking a look at it, the encryption and usability seem like a good fit and don't require them to rely on google/microsoft/salesforce for chatting.
I'm convinced that it doesn't matter how good the product is, what matters is the network effect. Nobody cares about privacy, what they care about is whether everyone else is using the same app. Until there's some doomsday scenario of everyones messages getting leaked or something (the closest was the WhatsApp privacy policy changes that triggered worldwide scrutiny and was a general PR nightmare), nobody will be moving en masse to a plucky small app that their network isn't on.
Also doesn't help that Signal are implementing features like crypto transactions that most people don't care about.
Several countries in Europe have already 1/10th of their population using Telegram. Telegram sees more than one million download per quarter in the UK alone.
Telegram is simply a much better app (better UI/UX) and nobody around me finds it weird. As soon as friends and family tries Telegram, they're hooked.
The network effect is already there and I guarantee you that if there still people finding it "weird", it won't last long.
There's also zero problem using both WhatsApp and Telegram (which many people do: I don't but many do).
Lol what? What exactly does far-right mean in this case? Why intersperse irrelevant political digs at another ill-defined faction? Does far-right just mean non-progressive and conservative?
I say sympathetic because I don’t believe you can understand anything without really seeing how a reasonable person could come to those same conclusions.
This of the "stop hitting yourself" form of argumentation.
Even if it were, it wouldn't matter. If I cared to I could construct an equivalent comment baiting right-wingers and declare victory when someone took issue with it.
If you're going to take someone getting pissed off as proof of something, anyone willing to engage in such rhetoric will be able to convince you of anything.
Beyond that, there is a pretty concerted effort to elevate minor grievances into the national spotlight to portray the left a certain way, e.g. the Oberlin Cafeteria scandal, where story in the college paper about the quality of the food in their college cafeteria became both a national news story and a symbol of just how deranged the left had become.
Is that actually indicative of anything? Is it something the general public should actually care about? Does it even reflect "the left" as a political body?
I think once you start asking those questions a lot of the "wrongthink" stories (not all!) start seeming a lot closer to college kids complaining about bad food than they are to the sands of politics and free speech shifting underfoot.
Somehow that got contorted by modern-day activists into "I can shout down or physically attack people I don't agree with" -- which is exactly opposite of what was being argued by Popper. It's an argument for more permissive expression, not less. He notes that the best path is nearly always rational argumentation of opposing views.
The book is a response to Plato, who generally opposed free speech for the masses. In general, Popper strongly disagrees with Plato. And it's important to note that he described of the paradox as he understood it from Plato, but does not necessarily endorse it.
The people suddenly fond of this one footnote might take a moment and read his work anyway, as they may be surprised to read his views on socialism and Marx specifically.
Also, he more-or-less does endorse the idea just a little bit beyond the famous paragraph:
>All these paradoxes can easily be avoided if we frame our political demands the way suggested in section II of this chapter, or perhaps in some such as this. We demand a government that rules according to the principles of equalitarianism and protectionism; that tolerates all who are prepared to reciprocate, i.e. who are tolerant; that is controlled by, and accountable to, the public.
So people shouting their enemies aren't doing the opposite of what Popper suggests, they are proof of what he claims. Remember, he viewed socialism as a beautiful dream, but struggled to align that with his views on individual freedom and how reaching such goal would be very difficult without violent means of overthrowing the status quo (these means again infringing on his beliefs of individual freedom).
Perhaps you are due for a re-reading of his work.
Poppler seems to think that fire must be fought with fire, that's his 'paradox'. He forgets or deliberately discounts the existence of fire extinguishers, e.g. checks and balances.
The only way I can use such a thing to understand left wing thought is by assuming someone is picking and choosing ideas in the pursuit of power . Citing it makes me think of an unconventional medieval priest who tries to justify burning all his enemies at the stake by combining Calvin's inflexible concept of damnation with the Catholic penchant for punishing sinners and heretics.
And the simplest statement of the paradox is "It's OK to persecute and kill collectivists (meaning communists and fascist), because they deny the validity of a universal reason". I assure you it's not an argument that justifies "de-platforming".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
>Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
Girard explores this phenomenon of scapegoating and postulates it goes back to primitive humans e.g. during a drought tensions rise within a tribe, and a certain "witchy" tribe member is singled out to take the blame and either expelled or murdered. After this, social tensions in the tribe are relieved (even if the drought does not subside), and the scapegoat paradoxically becomes a sacred, or savior, figure. Through history, this develops into ritual and religion. It provides a useful lens to reason about messianic cults, as well as social power dynamics.
There's a good overview on his Wikipedia page, but he delves into this particular topic in the book Violence and the Sacred. He also pioneered the field of Generative Anthropology, which other academics like Eric Gans have built upon, theorizing about the mechanism in much more detail, and using it to explain effects in modern culture.
Agreed that this is a compelling hypothesis
Have you looked through “A thousand plateaus” from Deleuze/Guattari (I don’t know anyone who has actually read the whole thing)?
I’m going to actually restart with just Ch15 and see if that is a better approach
> The rising intolerance of wrongthink on the right has been written about extensively but I’d love to read a sympathetic, anthropological investigation into it.
> I say sympathetic because I don’t believe you can understand anything without really seeing how a reasonable person could come to those same conclusions.
We are diving deep into the irony of bifurcated political systems where the two groups simultaneously believe themselves to be victims of their opposing teams rather than circumstance and systemic failures.
Basically, people are fed up with general bigotry, racism, misogyny, and the destruction of the environment -- all of which have real life and death consequences for many people. That, combined with polarization, has made people very reactive to which "side" they perceive things to be on.
Mind you, demagogues are not only politicians, they can be human rights activists, teachers, businessmen, neighbors, etc. Emotion managing should be a mandatory class at basic school, so many of us need to think with our heads instead of our guts.
Where does Signal need moderation? Can you have public groups where anyone can join?
EDIT: Just looked it up, there are now public groups. [1] Never noticed this despite using Signal as essentially the only messaging app for years.
EDIT: Actually not, there seems to be nothing on that web page and it is certainly nothing official.
[1] https://signal-groups.com/en/
""" Employees worry that, should Signal fail to build policies and enforcement mechanisms to identify and remove bad actors, the fallout could bring more negative attention to encryption technologies from regulators at a time when their existence is threatened around the world. “The world needs products like Signal — but they also need Signal to be thoughtful,” said Gregg Bernstein, a former user researcher who left the organization this month over his concerns. “It’s not only that Signal doesn’t have these policies in place. But they’ve been resistant to even considering what a policy might look like.” """
Could it be that Signal hadn't considered this type of policy because it's in exact opposition to e2e messaging? I swear these government propagandists don't even try to hide their intentions.
If the world needs products like Signal, then we just have to accept the inevitable fact that everyone will get products like Signal, or none will. This isn't enriched uranium, it can't be restricted to the few approved.
You say this in jest but encryption was export-controlled under ITAR in my lifetime. With the persistent government attacks on encryption increasing in frequency around the world, I wouldn't be surprised if we see more attempts at containing it in ways not unlike the control of enriched uranium.
And then Zimmerman sort of screwed that up, didn't he? I remember, bet we're about the same age.
> With the persistent government attacks on encryption increasing in frequency around the world, I wouldn't be surprised if we see more attempts at containing it in ways not unlike the control of enriched uranium.
Everything possible must be done to thwart such efforts.
At this current moment in history, in the United States at least, there aren't a lot of armed left wing groups. But right wing paramilitary groups have been on the rise for years, and recently they tried to overturn an election by force.
At a different time in history people would have fretted that the Weather Underground or Black Panthers would be using the app. But we're in 2023 and not 1970, and people are concerned about Proud Boys and Boogaloos.
That's factually incorrect. There's anti-authoritarian tendencies both on the right and the left, although right-wing anti-authoritarianism (also called libertarianism) is usually very inconsistent and leads to a paradox of "freedom of oppression/exploitation". Far right never meant anti-State capitalists.
Far-right refers historically to conservative and reactionary political groups, in particular it referred to royalists when the left-right concept was invented after the French revolution.
Nowadays, the term refers specifically to fascists, the political movements who believe in empowering the State to protect and develop Capital. Or as Mussolini put it, « Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power ».
From a quick glance the Wikipedia looks very detailed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-right
> cracking down on any dissidents
Well there is a huge crackdown on dissidents. However, except for the January 5th crew, it's very clearly not a crackdown against the right, but against the anti-authoritarian left (anarchists) and to some extent the authoritarian left (marxist-leninists) in the US context (see: COINTELPRO, Leonard Peltier, Mummia Abu Jamal...).
With so many trials, arrests and physical assaults against militant ecologists, zadists and anti-racist activists such as in the NODAPL case or against Cop City in Atlanta, it's hard to say the far-left isn't concerned by political repression. On the other hand, with so many terrorist attacks committed by white supremacists on US soil and so little reaction from the establishment, it's very clear that the powers that be are very complacent with the far right.
To go back to lands i know more about, in the EU, islamist attacks are only a few percents of all terrorists attacks. Yet the media only talks about those as if racist militias did not exist. On the other hand, eco-anarchists sabotaging ecocidal industrial projects such as in Notre-Dame-des-Landes or Sainte-Soline get called "eco-terrorists" on every media by the establishment, despite never spilling blood in their actions. And so many comrades rot in jail for daring to believe in a better world.
I'm not saying the term "far-right" can't be misused to misrepresent various (moderate) conservative positions, but claiming it's a rhetorical trick used by those in power to prevent dissent is far from the truth.
I don't see anyone asking that besides you, so it really begs the question why given all common sense and reasoning, you'd have to ask this.
This is why we can't have nice things. Why be rational and objective when there a clicks to bait?
Signal's target is more likely to understand the more true and subtle aspects of the word. But most importantly, Signal doesn't make money from ads. Ads that need eye-balls. So in that context, the word is definitely bait-y.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-right_politics
>Far-right politics, or right-wing extremism, refers to a spectrum of political thought that tends to be radically conservative, ultra-nationalist, and authoritarian, often also including nativist tendencies. The name derives from the left–right political spectrum, with the "far right" considered further from center than the standard political right.
To be clear, I'm not expressing an opinion here as to whether de Santis is far right. I'm saying that anyone who disagrees that he is will probably also disagree that at least one component of Wikipedia's definition applies to him.
I thought, just maybe, they're referring to the groups of openly fascist Americans who attacked the US capitol and organized other violent events. But maybe you're right and "far-right" is meaningless. I don't know why you would be right - it doesn't even make sense to raise the questions you raised, but I supposed we should consider your opinion.
In the sense that they are literally Nazi sympathizers who display Nazi imagery, talk about Nazi ideology, praise Hitler, and write/talk about their racist beliefs influencing their political beliefs. I am not going to dig through these articles for you now and I am not going to respond further because I do not believe you are posting in good faith, but this is for the readers. Look up, like, any article about fascists/Nazis at Jan 6.
Don't know what they mean, but to me, "far right" doesn't mean that. It means the most radical extreme of the right. Just like "far left" means the most radical extreme of the left. I'd even argue that the far right is not actually conservative, and the far left is not actually liberal.
Heck I'm labeled far-right just for suggesting that affirmative action is racist.
By who / where?
It depends how far you go. Does far-left just mean non-conservative and progressive? There's of course a subjective element to the answer, but there's objective arguments to be had as well, but in a specific context and timeframe.
For example, being opposed to abortion rights was once considered normal except in far-left circles where anarchists such as Emma Goldman or Émilie Lamotte organized clandestine courses and workshops. Half a century ago, it could have been considered mildly conservative to be against abortion rights. Nowadays, with many conservative right-wing voices standing for abortion rights, being against would place you immediately on the far-right ultra-conservative spectrum.
In the United States the situation is different, mostly due to decades of political lobbying and public disinformation against abortion orchestrated by fascist billionaires associated with various christian churches. But still, i'm guessing some parts of the right wouldn't dare question abortion rights. Despite the democrats being from an outsider's perspective a right-wing party (capitalist and rather conservative), let's pretend for a second the republican party are the entirety of the right, it's still not clear that all democrats stand for abortion and all republicans against:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/06/17/a-closer-...
Still, i think there is truth in what you say. As much as some issues such as gay/trans rights have advanced in the past decades, the political spectrum has shifted massively to the right in the Global North. Anti-immigration doctrines are far more common, and abolition of capitalism and wage slavery has almost become a taboo even on the so-called left. It's always both funny and sad to see people call Mélenchon or Sanders "far-left" when their social program is rather centrist and not more ambitious/communist than historically very right-wing programs (such as De Gaulle's after WWII).
There's zero evidence that Signal is being used for radical reactionary groups any more than radical progressive groups - and if there was evidence, the Signal employees would have very little additional knowledge due to app's design.
It’s not by accident of course, but yet it remains true that 99% of people see the word “anarchist” and think about the Anarchist cookbook or teenagers making prank calls and being angsty and throwing the odd Molotov cocktail.
No wonder then these comments are filled with people equivocating between “anti-government” Christi-fascists like the oath keepers and anarcho-communists like members of the DSA.
They couldn’t be further apart, but because both are “anti-government” then people assume it’s all the same cause it’s a binary system conceptually.
You’re either state capitalist or state communist there is no third option (or fourth! How absurd!).