> I am not usually one for paranoia, but is anyone else becoming more suspicious about Facebooks motivations and involvement with gov?
I worked for Facebook; I am friends with the people who developed this: I would like to reassure you strongly (well, as much as an Internet stranger can) on their motives. They are the good guys, and this was develop with people being spied on by abusive governments in mind — because those people use Messenger and would like to do it for those conversations too. Don’t trust me, but reach out to them if you are curious: few people appreciate their work, so they are generally happy to talk (about published work; unannounced products are very much off limits).
Facebook does collaborate with governments when the messages are not encrypted and the crimes are clear, and the court issued warrants. I seriously doubt any of those are political dissidents. Facebook engineers receive very generous poaching offers all the time, and they would have minimal economic damage from leaving the company over something like this. The shit-show from engineers leaving over that would massive (and many engineers are true believers).
I wasn’t in the company six months ago when that project was decided, but from my experience of the internal culture, I know that there was a debate on whether this feature could cover crimes that Facebook would object to — and the need for protecting the good guys obviously had the upper hand.
> Why doesn't FB just apply encryption on all messages?
> Surely they have the resources avail.
Scaling. I know nothing about this, but I have no doubt that this is the main reason. Any tiny amount of extra memory, computation, etc. times a billion becomes massive. Facebook struggles building enough capacity for all its services: the data center expansions you hear about are done a break-neck pace, to meet service expansion deadlines. The engineers working on this are heroes internally, and the units they use are unheard of outside of astronomy.
More specifically, they probably want to test some scaling aspects, but it might be unethical to use the usual approach of A/B testing.