Signal walks the line between anarchism and pragmatism
wired.com
wired.com
It wasn’t copied from Signal — at the protocol level, it is Signal:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
""" 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.
Contrast this clip of the George H.W. Bush of 1980 [1], to the rhetoric DeSantis uses in regards to immigration[2]:
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.
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's interesting how temporary solutions to problems can become permanent features of a (small) community.
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'.
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).
> 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.
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."
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.
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.
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'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).
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.
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.
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.
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!).
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.
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.
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.
Should I not have edited "How" back into the title?
(the usual answer)