Last night on Channel 4 News in the UK someone from Signal suggested Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-Un were just waiting for the UK Parliament to pass the Online Safety Bill and then they would start doing bad stuff to their people because we would have given them permission. Who knew?
Also, if Facebook Messenger and Instagram Direct adopted tools to detect child sexual abuse material people were trying to exchange using their services e.g. client-side scanning, apparently this will lead to the collapse of the world banking system because all forms of encryption everywhere will be busted. Every app. Er. No.
That’s what we call scaremongering.
Her next canard referenced “other tools” the police have to detect and jump on bad guys. Yes they do. But they don’t scale.
Even if we went full Stasi and 25% of the population were cops, it wouldn’t work. We hear about a few police successes in breaking up gangs that have used encryption. But often it’s because they got lucky with an initial lead which allowed them to get in, someone got sloppy, or they set a honey trap. These don’t scale.
We never hear about the volumes of online crimes the cops never resolve, the children whose hurt never ends, because the police don’t have the resources. Pre-existing social problems have been put on steroids by the internet. We need steroids to fight back. We will not roll over or acquiesce in a scary new world whose parameters have been set by private companies and private organizations in pursuit either of profits or a particular view of how the world should work.
Finally, what Signal would not say was this “Yes we are creating an impenetrable world which is beyond the reach of law enforcement and the courts. Yes we are undermining the Rule of Law. Get used to it.”
Signal has Ts&Cs forbidding users to break the law but zero means of enforcement unless the user does something stupid.
Not good enough. Not acceptable
Desiderata 