'Encryption is deeply threatening to power': Meredith Whittaker of Signal

  At the same time, the Clinton administration endorsed surveillance advertising as a business model, so there was an incentive to gather data about your customers in order to sell to them.

Does someone know more?

I believe that an educated population poses a greater threat to "power" more than anything else. If more people understood what encryption is and how it affects the integrity and confidentiality of communication(and understood what those terms mean) and why privacy is important, we would be having a much more constructive discussion or at least adopting a more united adversarial stance against attacks on these technologies and rights, similar to the 90s when the online population was generally more technical and concerned about these issues as a whole.

More than anything, attacks on encryption and privacy should be seen as attacks against the social contract we have with those in power, and they're failing to provide adequate justification for the mass erosion of privacy.

In a past world ability to communicate easily, cheaply, fast, around the whole world was definitively threatening. In the present hyper-surveilled world let's pretend for an instance that Signal is a totally good netizen, once used on closed source Android-based macro-bugs (aka smart-phone, the big bug bout and kept working by the spied target instead of by the spy) how can it's encryption "encrypt" anything? All you type is typed with a closed virtual keyboard on a connected closed system...

Even in the past those who know, so those who can be a threat for those in power also know how to communicate covertly, it was not cheap, not fast, not sure and not easy, but it was done in every single historic moment.

The threat nowadays for the oppressor is the individual ability to communicate, no matter if in clear text or not, but the ability to communicate uncensored, the ability to own, devices and data, the ability to be autonomous instead of depending on the big and powerful. So Signal might be a threat to WA, not to the government. The threat is the fact that almost everybody can run their own XMPP server, a small SIP Witch instance, or maybe a Murmur/Mumble one, the ability to operate in an open network without depending on the GAFAM and without easy censorship.

In term of secrecy even if we print something we can't trust modern printers, proprietary iron, connected, with enough resources to offer a webapp for configuration and so on, we can't be safe that the printer itself do not store and send here an there any documents, do not inject dots-signature to identify the printer and so on. We can't even talk in a modern connected car confident that the car OEM do not get the complete record. Encryption in that sense matter very, very little. At maximum it makes less easy to plant false evidence in citizens systems in case the government or someone else want to falsely accuse them of something. A classic accusation let's say for a new disturbing candidate of CSAM-related and tax-fraud related stuff to be found thereafter for a just-in-time show-trial.

These things are power and they can be co-opted to decrypt the messages of any target surreptitiously, without even the knowledge of Signal.

Centralized power you have no vote in is a dictatorship, and dictatorships have a single point of failure, no matter how benevolent, that will be co-opted by a more powerful governing body.

Centralized control of communications is fundamentally incompatible with the free and private speech required for a functioning democracy.

Delete Signal and rebuild your social graphs on fully open decentralized or federated platforms.