Somewhat related - Can someone explain this to me? France and Germany want to lessen dependence on American organizations, so they choose Matrix, also an American organization.
BwMessenger is a partnership with "ELEMENT SOFTWARE SARL" (according to https://messenger.bwi.de/datenschutz), the French entity of the commercial side of the people originally behind the open Matrix ecosystem (https://element.io/legal/company-information). I'm not sure why the French entity is doing business with the Germans as Element also has a German entity, but either way the American side is not the one doing the work.
For the American entity, a lot (most?) of the work that's not from unrelated open source contributors seems to be coming in from either EU countries or the UK.
Element is also UK headquartered, albeit with French/German/US subsidiaries when selling to those respective governments. BWI buy via France because when we started working with them we didn’t have a German legal entity yet.
Who perhaps chose the UK in an effort to distance themselves from the US
As I said, I see now my assumption was wrong
- Neither 'Hodgson' or 'Le Pape' sound Israeli
- Likely they went to American universities
etc
here is discussion about start of matrix: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45495134
Oh, and as everyone has said. Only some of the developers are from the US
Seems like the majority of the team are in the EU anyway: https://matrix.org/foundation/about/
Yes, sort of.
The thing is, the government is already not permitted to wiretap people, at least without reasonable suspicion.
Wiretaps themselves are not admissible in court, and can only be offered as a mechanism to correlate behaviour anyway. At least in the UK. (Which, is ironic when you consider what's going on there with online speech, but I digress).
Factually speaking, in order to do a crime you have to physically do a crime, the police knowing when and where do not require access to your communications to figure out. They will sting people, get people to turn on other people or simply catch red-handed when doing ordinary police work.
If we legitimately believe what the governments of the world are saying: that we need to embolden the police. Then funding them properly is the right start, yet nobody seems to be doing that. The EU has been making cross border communication easier though, which is in-line with emboldening the police, so I'll give them that.
Having more information will do very little to help, for the same reason that phone taps aren't given out freely (and never have been) - because even if you have the data, you have to choose how to act on it, and you'd need the resources to investigate and follow-through.
There is a distinct irony that unencrypted SMS is more secure than online messengers, because there are legal protections.
I'm not referring to hinder meaning prevent, I'm referring to how "hinder someone to use" is not grammatical. https://www.merriam-webster.com/sentences/hinder
Probably. But criminal organizations also benefit from having electricity, or cars, or a million other things that we all would be much worse off if we didn't have them. Just because something benefits criminal organizations as a side effect is not really a reason to not do it for the benefit of ordinary citizens.