Imagine you witness a murder in a restaurant, cold blooded and it's dirty cops working for a three letter institution that did it. You want to give evidence like a law abiding, upstanding citizen with nothing to hide. Suddenly you have something to hide despite having done nothing wrong.
"Nothing to hide" means nothing to hide from all current and future humans who control some small aspect spying on you. Even just control access for 30 seconds. It's nuts. Even if you think every single last one of the current guys are honest and completely competent despite the head of them criminally lying, while under oath, in answer to a question with notice in legitimate oversight. Who is going to infiltrate that power in 10 years? Radical anti-fa is impossible? White supremacists impossible? Religious cultists? Organised crime? People flipped to work for hostile foreign nations?
"I have nothing to hide" is is gradeschool silliness to be treated with contempt every time it comes up. It needs to be ridiculed as anyone suggesting it is an idiot or just totally and knowingly dishonest. There are just so many ways it is completely wrong, the only debate is which of the ways it is false and a con is more important than the other.
Police regularly bust young Chinese for marijuana possession by reading their chat messages. And we are just as human and no more special than the Chinese.
A friend of mine was taken into an unmarked van and questioned after some tweets he made while at an Occupy Wall Street protest. The motives absolutely exist in the US.
Next time someone says that ask if they use blinds in their house/apt, if you could setup a webcam in their living room, or if you could just read some texts between them and a significant other. Or ask for their passwords, date of birth, SSN, credit card numbers, pets' names, and parents' names.
Simple things like this are why I talk to people via Signal and why I'll never get a Ring/Nest doorbell, or any other 3rd party owned internet connected camera.
So arguing "what if I spy on YOU?" wont convince anyone. They see that as a completely different thing.
Of course this only helps as long as your device isn't backdoored but that is true for any app.
(I say this as someone who regularly defend Telegram here, because in my opinion I don't have to pick one or another.)
I wonder what the next Crypto AG (CIA front) will be
NSA: VPN and "secure" webmail providers
CIA: They don't need fronts anymore, they have CISCO, Juniper, Netgear, etc.
so yeah if SV firms were not extensions of the US govt. (hardware firms too, not just software), they would have already been broken up years ago.
the senate hearings are just a charade used to stroke the ego's of the 'visionary' SV tech bro CEOs. they also show us how tech illiterate the working class has been made. [2]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pVfYmttcag, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9oMYL2M_tE
[2] https://www.vpro.nl/argos/lees/onderwerpen/cryptoleaks/2020/...
[3] https://jacobinmag.com/2015/03/socialism-innovation-capitali...
The only semi-popular better option I can think of is Matrix, but getting people on Signal is already hard enough and using Matrix on a mobile device is (last I checked) far from ideal.
Security is a gradient, not an all-or-nothing. Signal is vastly better than almost every other electronic communication method.
- side-load a peer reviewed apk so you can check the sigs and make sure all crypto is being done locally (and to make sure that the implementation is solid)
- manage your own keys like you would with traditional pgp emails. Give your public to your friend. Force them to send anything sensitive using it. Maybe change to symmetric keys from asym but rotate occasionally. But you still have to trust the app you use to do this unless you want to do it manually each time.
*These don't necessarily solve the Metadata issue
Signal has open sourced clients with reproducible builds (on Android) and their encryption library has been reviewed by multiple 3rd parties to great acclaim.
PGP lacks forward secrecy, meaning if a key does get compromised all of your past correspondence is now also compromised.
Edit: As someone that has heard of forward secrecy but not how it relates to pgp, these were helpful reads:
I think this is the closest analogy I've heard yet, but not in windows on suburban, tree-lined street. People walk down those streets and the windows are at eye level. Someone could accidentally see into those windows. No, I think if we consider windows in hi-rise buildings in a major city, the analogy is getting much closer. Seeing into one of those windows requires a bare minimum of intent and possibly an inexpensive tool, say binoculars or a telescope. However I would be willing to bet that a large portion of hi-rise dwellers do NOT close their blinds on the theory of "No one is looking in MY window."
That might be an aspirational sentiment, but given most competent adults are in the "I have nothing to hide" category, I don't think it's true at all. I don't think these people are idiots, or dishonest, just ignorant. And it's not even their fault.
Now I say most adults are in that category, but I don't have data on that. I'm going by observed behaviour. We don't see a massive push against tracking / spying and even when it's thrown in our faces (eg: Snowden, Manning) we respond with a collective shoulder shrug.
I have nothing to hide is different than "I literally need to hide".
"I literally need to hide and I'm also aware of that change" might be true or might be false. You might "literally need to hide" and not know it while the so-called "nothing" you had to hide is used against you when you have done nothing morally or legally wrong.
Reader beware.
Also consider that tech will exonerate as much as otherwise: for such and such murder, the 'background use' of the tech would be to provide you with an alibi.
Forensics have generally improved Justice I think, not the other way around.
In the end I think Apple's issue should be one of transparency and privacy and we need to push them towards that.
The power is asymmetric. The NSA, CIA, FBI, Apple, Google, Police have a lot of power so they need to be very, very transparent in its use and oversight. You do not have that power, privacy is the only thing you can have to protect yourself from abuse.
The other point about about not having to worry about it as an individual is equally wrong. The equivalent argument is that you aren't a doctor so you don't need to worry about a purge of all doctors if one were proposed. Whereas obviously you do need to worry if anyone you care about ever gets sick. So it goes with standing up to corruption. Even if _you_ never stand up to it, your life is greatly adversely affected the harder that is for genuine heroes who make the sacrifice to do it because its the right thing.
"If you have nothing to hide you have been conned."
You are nothing. You are navel lint. But all the navel lint gets sucked up into the filter, too.
Welcome to the quiet all-seeing eye. Tremble and kneel to those who will wield it! Don't deviate from social norms. Don't be different. Don't stick out. Just pretend you don't know.
As far as I can tell, in this scenario, the journalist has powered off their phone, ignored the message about "findable when power off," and then is somehow tracked through the BT beacon and Find My network.
Were their phone to be on, all the same tracking would work.
Were they to read the message and go change the settings, this tracking would presumably not work.
That assumes you trust that the "always on processor" only does what it says it does, of course. But in that case, any proprietary device is just as bad as any other. (Many supposedly less-proprietary devices could be sneakily subverted, too, no?)
Specifically, I believe the real risk seems to be that you have very few ways to know if your device is doing anything when it's on or off unless the manufacturer tells you.
If you don't believe that everyone, including your government is corrupt, the only solution is through government regulation. Clearly the private companies are otherwise going to do what they will.