We fund Matrix dev by selling encrypted messaging to governments | Hacker News Reader

We fund Matrix dev by selling encrypted messaging to governments

mastodon.matrix.org

44 pointsraybb45 comments

Government organizations, including police departments, use software just like businesses and individuals do. When governments switch to free and open source software like Element or other Matrix clients, it adds transparency to their operations and saves taxpayer money. It makes no sense to protest Element being used by governments or police, since it is certainly better than the more costly proprietary alternatives.

Element could have done more to emphasize in their communications that they are working to provide end-to-end encrypted messaging services to government, and not to leak other users' end-to-end encrypted messages to any government. But boycotting Element or Matrix because it is also used by government or police for secure end-to-end encrypted messaging is strange logic that I can't see most people adopting.

Yes, I have to think most of these people are Twitter converts looking for something to get worked up over. Because it's definitely not a bunch of people who understand what they're saying. It would be like boycotting email because the guy who happened to write the protocol also runs a mail server and sells accounts to government entities.

I’m a staunch proponent of “if someone misunderstood you, it’s your fault for communicating badly” but I can’t fault Matrix here.

What happened is not “Matrix accidentally made it sound like they sell your message history to governments”. Instead, what happened is “Matrix said they enter business contracts with governments to sell services that they offer for free to citizens”.

The impression that message history was somehow being sold only arose as a last-ditch Hail Mary attempt to provide some theory, however unlikely, for making sense of how anyone could get that mad about that. It was not proposed by anyone who’s mad at Matrix, it was proposed by outside observers (who are not themselves mad at Matrix) who can’t otherwise understand how anyone could be mad at Matrix.

The missing piece of information is that there are people mad at Matrix in roughly the same sort of way that there are people mad at Dunkin Donuts for selling donuts to cops. (Arguably there is some more principled take, that government employees don’t have the right to unbreakably encrypt communication, since it might be communication done in the line of work and should therefore be transparent in case of corruption. To be clear, I don’t see that particular principled position being voiced, and I am not taking a stance on that position either way.)

IMO it's not a police-level decision whether they use encrypted communication, or how that communication is handled down the line. Like you said, Element is Dunkin' Donuts; if you don't want your cops eating donuts, petition your local police dept to enforce that. DD just sells donuts, they're not activists.

On the bright side, DD doesn't exclusively own the concept of donuts, and if someone doesn't like DD's policy of servicing everyone equally, they are able to go down the street and buy their donuts elsewhere.

The analogy kinda breaks down when you consider the added detail that, in this case, "donuts" only exist because of the R&D that Dunkin' Donuts was able to fund by selling them to big buyers like police.

My natural reading of the statement was that “we sell our customers’ encrypted messaging to police and governments.” I feel like that is the most natural reading, and the alternative — that “we sell our encrypted messaging service to police and governments” - just elicits a giant “so what?” in my opinion.

I would argue the alternative reading is by far the most likely, but the (natural, correct) reaction of “so what?” combined with “this has been brought to my attention as important / it must be important because it’s at the top of hacker news” means the obvious and boring but accurate interpretation gets put aside, in favor of the most plausible explanation that justifies it being Big News (that they’re selling access to encrypted message history to governments). The missing piece of info that integrates all the other information is that some people are ~always mad at police and government.

Are Mastodon users really that dim or are they trolls? Encrypted messaging is good unless the government uses it? I don't understand their reasoning.

Why would you assume there aren't idiots who use Mastodon? Why would you make a broad a generalization about all Mastodon users?

There's dolts on HN (myself included probably), but not everybody is a moron. Twitter was the same story.

A year+ ago, mastodon was almost exclusively used by people who had a principled reason to. They understood why Twitter was volatile and manipulative. Within the last year, many people converted specifically because they don't like Musk, and have no idea what mastodon really is. I would bet more than half of those converts don't even know what a federated platform is, they think mastodon is just another Twitter competitor, and when Musk "buys it" they'll all be ready to jump ship again to some Chinese Twitter clone.

So yes, I do not think this thread full of fundamental misunderstandings on mastodon could have happened a year ago, at least it's not nearly as likely, or to this scale.

Is this not an indicator of success? Normies using it means it works.

Email is used by people who have no idea what it really is, and I would bet more than half of those people don't know what decentralization is.

Shall we do HTTPS and DNS next?

You're lamenting a piece of software being apolitical and its users largely becoming non-militant in their ideology. Users are users. If the purpose of Mastodon is to provide a decentralized Twitter-like experience then that's what it has succeeded in doing.

Do we boo and hiss over grandma using an Android phone because she doesn't believe in the power of open source or even know what it is?

It's clearly both. Some are dim, some are trolls, some are both. And sane people double-checked the words, shrugged and didn't bother commenting.

Encrypted messaging might be good, and giving the matrix devs a financial incentive to stay in the governments good graces might be bad.

If they're paying your paychecks, you're going to think twice about implementing features they won't like.

Then fork, extend, plugin, whatever.

Chrome also still allows uBlock, etc. (myself on FF though)

Govts also use the JVM or Linux: did those projects suffer?

I think FLOSS is for all: the good guy and the bad guy (in whomever's eyes), its about freedom not control.

"Mastodon users",... jeez, thanx. Yeah, we really are pretty dim, but at least we never generalize.

(Edit: You see it’s funny because this is a generalization, pretty dim right!)

In the most generous possible reading of some of the comments, there's a distinction to be made between "the government"/"the police"/etc. using encrypted messaging versus actively supporting those entities and supplying them with a product that furthers their goals. After all, a big part of the value proposition is avoiding government and police surveillance.

That being said, I find it difficult to take most of the comments seriously when the debate quickly descends into conspiracy theories about theoretical encryption backdoors.

I know Matrix is struggling with funding, but I can see how people see things like https://mastodon.matrix.org/@element/110310853505977058 as supporting industries/agencies rather than just selling software.

However, most of the comments seem to be pure paranoia, but you see such paranoia on all tech sites. There are plenty of accusations of backdoors and government plants to be found here on HN too. The difference is that social media doesn't have downvotes to get those messages out of view when you first open the page.

They're just that dim. It's made up of people who would use Twitter, but find the fact its a corporation / Elon so objectionable they use Mastodon instead. Of course they're going to have ridiculous takes on funding through providing software to governments.

And you're ass-pulling non-facts on the comment section of an HN post instead of doing pretty much anything else.

This is a surpassingly stupid story; some random person on Mastodon is upset that New Vector (the Matrix/Element parent) contracts to governments to run Matrix. The complaint is silly. Governments use word processors, spreadsheets, and databases, too.

We'd be better off just not having a thread on this than recapitulating social media drama here.

I’m not sure if the commenters are outraged that element is selling messaging services to police and governments, or if that the wording was not good and they think that element is selling user’s messages to police.

I had a bit of a discussion with some of the more level-headed commenters via Mastodon.

It turns out the original problem stemmed from their CPO speaking at the European Police Conference.

https://mastodon.matrix.org/@element/110310853505977058

The vitriol spiraled out from there, because it's one thing to allow police and governments to use your FOSS (because, you can't really stop them, no?), but to actively support that and use that in your marketing is another thing altogether.

What's wrong with police using your software? Are public safety and a functioning society something to oppose?

It's not like they're selling to the CCP - these are democratic European countries.

There's a very reasonable double standard between private citizens using encrypted messaging tools and their ostensible public servants using them in a public capacity.

Put another way: there's no sense in which the public is made safer or society is made to function more wholly when the police are less accountable due to un-subpoenable communications.

As long as the encrypted communications are logged and available in accordance with public records-retention policies, using a good encryption system sounds like a good thing, no?

Sure. But that isn't end-to-end encryption; that's a weird key escrow thing. It would be a little strange for Matrix to officially support that kind of use case, since it's indistinguishable in the general case from dangerous, privacy-compromising forms of key escrow[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

Govs use Red Hat Enterprise Linux, is Red Hat inherently bad? What else would they use? Fucking WhatsApp like the UK gov during the pandemic?

I didn't say Matrix was "inherently bad." Where's that coming from?

If you're asking me what I think the police should use for police business: I don't care, as long as it can be made accountable to the public. The technology behind it literally does not matter to me, so long as that constraint is satisfied.

I think I must have hit reply on the wrong comment on my phone as it doesn't make sense in context.

Sorry!

The German army also uses the Matrix protocol [1] and I don't see, why they shouldn't or how Matrix could stop them, the Matrix protocol is open after all. Instead I think this shows that Matrix is secure and so well tested that it is good enough for the military (aka. good enough for me).

[1] https://element.io/case-studies/bundeswehr

> Are public safety and a functioning society something to oppose?

To some, that seems to be the case.

Most of the replies I read misunderstood the wording. But some took a clear ideological stance against providing services to the police.

It’s those kind of interactions that made me leave Mastodon in the end. I’m neither right wing nor left wing, I’m just pro-common sense, and people who flaunt their ideology through megaphones make me hate this planet.

Common sense dictates that giving more power and safety to governments is not a good thing. Especially when said governments already attack innocent civilians, and will use that power to further harm others.

Common sense doesn’t dictate that. Ideology does. For every argument for it, there’s an argument against it - the disagreement between the two sides of it is rarely on the facts, but on the weight one holds on various things.

And that’s where ideology comes in.

If civilians have access to private communication, and can pay for enhanced features, why should govt organisations not? OTOH why are the implications on transparency? It’s a hard one.

Is personal privacy more important than the ability to prevent domestic terror and the distribution of material that we can all (I’d hope) agree is abhorrent? That’s not a trivial question.

The list could go on. There are arguments on both sides and they’re far from settled. Me, I just get fed up of seeing people adopt these ideas as if they’re gospel and (as in the mastodon thread) start screaming fascism, as if they have any idea what it is.

Occam's Razor is over here telling me that most commenters are more worried about being on the bandwagon than rationally considering their position on this matter.

Element's position is a little simpler: Government agencies give them money and blowhards on the Internet generally don't.

Initially I was rather confused and had indeed thought they were selling encrypted messages to police/government for SNDL (store now decrypt later) purposes.

Though regardless, them so adamantly supporting the very organizations who want to destroy them is never a good look, especially when a lot of people run to encrypted messaging as an escape from government censor to begin with.

Messaging not messages.

I prefer that the government, including police, uses open source software and protocols. Taxes are spent better on that than on proprietary software and platforms.

Story from quite recent past.

I went to Stockholm this week to attend the AWS Summit. When the plane touched down in Stockholm, I figured that I'll message some friends via Matrix, if any of them wanna meet.

My messages didn't seem to go through. That's weird, but I guess roaming is blocking that somehow (I wonder how/why, isn't it just https? Oh well)... So I try it again bit later, when I'm on wlan.

Exactly same error. Client says that my messages cannot be sent. This is when I notice that none of the busy channels have had new messages.

And that's when I noticed that my Matrix provider has been having a serious database outage, starting about the time I arrived in Stockholm. The whole server is down and the only blatant symptom is that the client complains about outgoing messages.

P2P is a WIP, which could alleviate issues like this. Did you report the problem on GitHub at least?

I guess there are two separate problems here:

1. The UX problem where connection problems aren't signalled properly

2. A single server bringing down the whole service (from that server's user's perspective)

1 should be easy to report and perhaps even fix. I don't know if 2 can be fixed with this decentralized design. Matrix in its current form is quite vulnerable to single server failures.

Bad phrasing has a lot of people up in arms. Unfortunate PR incident for Element/Matrix.

Not just bad phrasing, but bad phrasing + an attack on their userbase. And even for those who saw the bad phrasing, a hardcore pro-government stance is never gonna go well with security/privacy minded individuals, especially on alt media.

Interest alignment doesn't quite work here.

It seems to me like it is pointing out actual interest alignment to the ostriches. None of those agencies want their data to be compromised by a faulty backdoor for another agency in another country, they also know they can't develop good enough systems on their own to have secrecy+usability for themselves but not for the public..

    stupid
    adjective
    stu· pid ˈstü-pəd
    a: slow of mind : obtuse
    b: See comments on https://mastodon.matrix.org/@element/110340953550548309

I don't think we should blame Matrix for trying to get funding for their open source project, but it's also hard to blame everyone's reaction after such bad wording. Even marketing that their technology is used by governments is understandable - it does mean something. But it's no excuse for answering good-faith users in this way.

It's a straightforward expression of the company's position. I prefer it to the usual load of hedged PR bollocks.

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