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The Battle Inside Signal

100 points by tchalla 6y ago

followthesmell 6y ago
I wondered when the censors would come for Signal. I'm glad to see Signal is aiming to just be privacy-oriented law-abiding infrastructure.
rzz3 6y ago
There is no battle, one employee may have left. Also this is completely horrifying. Signal with a content policy?! It’s end to end encrypted. Wtf are people trying to do here.
- thu2111 6y ago
  Right, one guy who isn't even that sure about his own beliefs. I was worried when I read the headline, but the more important thing is that Acton is screening employees to ensure they actually agree with the goals of the organisation. He is clearly able to articulate his own philosophical position on this (focus on bad people, not neutral technologies), and Signal is financially totally dependent on him, which suggests that Signal's philosophy will remain aligned with Acton for the forseeable future. The primary risk to Signal at the moment seems to come from Google and Apple, not internal employee dissent.
diveanon 6y ago
So just out of curiosity for those in defense of unmoderated e2e encrypted coms: When terrorists and cp distributers are using your platform which of your ideals will take precedence?
- babesh 6y ago
  You mean we should ban encryption on the physical hardware of the Internet? Once there is a mechanism to verify the identity of the other party, those two parties don’t need the platform to do end to end encryption. Each party generates a public/private key pair, does some double encryption magic, and it’s all over. The platform doing this is a convenience. The platform storing this is just giving the government a convenient place to decrypt it once they have coerced the keys from one or more of the parties. I wonder how that would fly with the citizens of other countries that use Signal? Would they be comfortable with the US government reading their messages? Why is the left now so into policies that they decry when done in other countries: social scoring, travel bans, censorship? What is going on? Is the US going through it’s version of China’s Cultural Revolution?
  - approxim8ion 6y ago
    Has GP indicated that they are on "the left"? There is a growing idea especially among Americans that all "left" people are authoritarians. It's even funnier because the idea of "terrorists and cp distributors" using encryption to bypass regulation was floated in your Congress was almost verbatim the reasoning behind the EARN IT act, introduced in Senate by Lindsey Graham, whom I hope you don't think is on the left. It went on to receive bipartisan support as well.
    - babesh 6y ago
      Quotes from the article leave that impression. “The app saw a surge in usage during last year’s protests for racial justice, even adding a tool to automatically blur faces in photos to help activists more safely share images of the demonstrations. This kind of growth, one that supported progressive causes, was exciting to Signal’s roughly 30-member team.” “But as the US presidential election grew closer, some Signal employees began raising concerns that group links could be abused. On September 29th, during a debate, President Trump had told the far-right extremist group the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” During an all-hands meeting, an employee asked Marlinspike how the company would respond if a member of the Proud Boys or another extremist organization posted a Signal group chat link publicly in an effort to recruit members and coordinate violence.“ ““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.” ———— You do know that there was also coordinated violence in the BLM protests.
      - approxim8ion 6y ago
        I'm specifically talking about the person you replied to, not the article, which is more of an opinion piece with facts interspersed.
        babesh 6y ago
        I didn’t say that specific person was left. But yes I should have been more clear. And yes, I know about that bill and that it was supported by Republicans. In fact, I linked to it in an earlier comment prior to your comment.
- approxim8ion 6y ago
  What are moderated e2ee comms? How do you moderate content you are not expected to have any access to by design? And if the answer is to not have encryption, then when activists or groups that are being actively targeted and threatened need secure communications but find none, who is that on?
- girvo 6y ago
  If it’s E2E encrypted how do you propose finding out about it? And frankly it’s a near certainty they already do. I know drug dealers do at least.
autoexec 6y ago
I dumped signal less over the data collection they've started doing and more for the fact that they've been less than transparent about it. Nearly a year ago their forums were filled with objections, security concerns, and questions and for months they went ignored. When they finally made setting a pin optional they were equally unclear that it would just set a random one for you and that this didn't prevent your data from being uploaded to the cloud. I took it as a sign that they were telling us not to trust them as clearly as they were allowed. For secure communications I'm using Jami now and I've been very impressed. For SMS/MMS in general I'm still looking. I've tried a few alternatives and frankly I'm not really happy with any of them.
- rzz3 6y ago
  They’re trying to unwind Signal from phone numbers. Also who uses SMS anymore?:)
  - autoexec 6y ago
    The phone number is not even the worst part really. Signal's privacy policy says they don't collect and store sensitive info, but how is a list of everyone you've been in contact with not sensitive? Sadly I've had very little luck getting my family to move to Signal and less luck getting them to use Jami. The bulk of my communications are unsecured SMS/MMS. It's such a basic function that I'm surprised open source solutions aren't better. Whatever they've become Signal had a pretty great interface.
    - tmp538394722 6y ago
      it’s hard for me to read something like this and believe you aren’t being deliberately misleading. All this stuff is only stored in an encrypted form that signal never has the keys for.
      - autoexec 6y ago
        The fact that's encrypted doesn't matter. There are a number of potential issues with collecting it in the first place. You can see some of the security concerns which were brought up on their forums here: https://community.signalusers.org/t/proper-secure-value-security-pins-are-too-easy-to-brute-force-sgx-is-not-reliable-enough/15096 https://community.signalusers.org/t/proper-secure-value-secu...
ekianjo 6y ago
> “The response was: if and when people start abusing Signal or doing things that we think are terrible, we'll say something,” said Bernstein, who was in the meeting, conducted over video chat. “But until something is a reality, Moxie's position is he's not going to deal with it.” > Bernstein (disclosure: a former colleague of mine at Vox Media), added, “You could see a lot of jaws dropping. That’s not a strategy — that’s just hoping things don’t go bad.” So what's the alternative, exactly, when you are supposed to keep things encrypted between users? Either you are a conduit or a publisher, you have to choose.
- analyte123 6y ago
  They could put virality limiters on content, for example limiting the number of times a message can be forwarded. WhatsApp is known to have done this. They could also let people report users (and unmask their content) and ban them if they get enough reports. They could also push out clientside hash checking of controversial content once they’ve received reports and stop it from propagating there - just get the database from GIFCT. If group membership can be seen by others in the group, they could also take reports of group membership from NGO or government observers and ban everyone in the group. One does not simply chat online.
  - artificialLimbs 6y ago
    Yep, they could pull a Whatsapp.
- dleslie 6y ago
  I'd start by keeping groups private and invite-from-contacts only. Then Signal is no more culpable than any other chat service over which OTR or similar could operate.
kr99x 6y ago
Again I lament the falling respect for and understanding of free speech as a principle that helps us all. Only when communication between two willing parties is unhindered is it even possible to build a just world. The power to clamp down on voluntary communication is a power no authority should ever be trusted with, because there are no examples in the history of mankind where that power is only used for good - arguably there can be no such examples, what with power being a vector for corruption.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  Back when radio was the only mass medium that you could reach entire populations on, would you have argued that anyone with a POV should be able to broadcast over the air, "because free speech" ? Back when there were only 3 TV networks that reached the whole of the US, would you have argued that anyone with a POV should be able to get some time (how long?) on one of those networks, "because free speech" ? Free speech never meant the ability to demand the use of any mechanism or any resource to reach a real or hypothetical audience. Changing the definition because lots of people chat on social media doesn't cut it, I think.
  - kr99x 6y ago
    You are badly misunderstanding the situation. A world with 3 TV networks is a world of limited airtime, so of course people will not give their slots up freely for others. That is not the world we are in now. It costs no "space" to let messages of any kind go through your platform. It costs (nearly) no bandwidth. It is generally profitable. The only reason messages are being restricted is because those who control the platform don't like them. A TV network wouldn't give airtime to any old wacko because it was a limited resource. Signal choosing not to give use of their platform to somebody they don't like is categorically different.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
      > You are badly misunderstanding the situation. Those radio and TV networks were, before the internet, the only way you could broadcast to the nation, or the city, or the region or whatever. If you wanted to reach many people and not in print, you had to be on them. As you note, this is no longer the case. The resource you want access to is, variously, either the internet itself or (e.g.) Signal's audience. You don't need Signal for the former, and you don't have any constitutional or moral right to the latter.
hacknat 6y ago
How can one even develop a content-policy for something like Signal? Isn't supposed to be impossible for them to ever see your messages anyway?
marketingtech 6y ago
Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25911568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25911568
dannyw 6y ago
Dear Signal: please don’t moderate speech. You should never see my speech, or be in a position to enforce any content policy. The same way USPS doesn’t go around opening letters and getting rid of whatever they don’t like.
- tdeck 6y ago
  I'm surprised that none of these comment threads are addressing the scenario posed in TFA: > During an all-hands meeting, an employee asked Marlinspike how the company would respond if a member of the Proud Boys or another extremist organization posted a Signal group chat link publicly in an effort to recruit members and coordinate violence. Like it or not, something like this will happen eventually and Signal will become aware of it, if only through the press. It only makes sense to have a policy framework to deal with these things rather than flying by the seat of your pants. Perhaps the policy will be "we won't take down group chats without a court order", or perhaps it will be something else. But to just punt until a link to some folks planning a lynch mob arrives in press@signal.org is irresponsible both to the platform and to the society.
  - dleslie 6y ago
    So don't make the chats public and linkable. Make group chats invite-only.
  - robjan 6y ago
    There's little they can do since the idea of "group" is stored on the users device. Groups don't exist on Signal servers and they can't see when a message is sent to a group.
    - thu2111 6y ago
      I don't see how the group links feature can work if that's 100% correct. You can't send someone a hyperlink to a phone. Unless these group links are some special protocol that does some sort of P2P link to the creator's phone (which would presumably then have to be on all the time for it to work). More importantly than group links is what happens to Signal when someone realises that they can change people's public keys on a whim. Although the app is supposed to display a notification in that case, they can also change the app on a whim. Fundamentally, I just do not see how Signal's social goals (which are laudable) are compatible with their chosen implementation. Marlinspike's arguments about centralisation vs decentralisation and the moving ecosystem are all valid yet in the end it doesn't matter. He identified a problem and basically ignored the where his chain of logic led, i.e. that he would need to figure out how to keep up with a moving ecosystem in a decentralised way. Otherwise, the end game is easy to anticipate: they bend and start swapping public keys silently, either due to police pressure, or pressure from internal activist employees, or pressure from Google/Apple.
gcblkjaidfj 6y ago
>>> https://element.io/ https://element.io/
mc32 6y ago
Oh, dear. I really can't believe it. I can see any commercial application like What's App or FB or TWTTR being coy about speech and not having the privacy of their users in mind, and bending to prevailing winds --not having fast principles. But Signal? Signal? Do these idealist engineers not envision the comms that can happen on e-e encrypted systems? They don't think criminals, hooligans, spies, unsavory people, sex criminals, drugs dealers, arms dealers, etc. would use the network? Oh, but boy, wait, what if people in whose politics we don't believe in use it? Oh, noes. In this case we have to be careful and raise concerns --but those other things, no, that's why we believe in freedom of speech and e-e encryption. Sigh. They believe in things, until they don't. Which means they don't truly believe in the principles they said they believed in. What's that old saw, I believe in freedom of speech for the people I agree with? Moxie should get up there next time and say: "If you only believe this product should be used by people you agree with, then you took the wrong job". It's like the Komsomol have come to town.
- edgyquant 6y ago
  This was my thinking as well. Their concerns were ridiculous and echoed what we heard a couple years ago when politicians were looking for mandatory back doors. What did they think the point of encryption was other than to allow people to have discussions without interference. I get it, I’m not a fan of the groups they’re discussing by a long shot, but I’m also not working at a non-profit dedicated to providing the world with safe, encrypted, messaging.
- ironman1478 6y ago
  I mean, people's views on things should change based on evidence. This isn't 'i disagree with their politics so I need to change the platform to silence them'. There was an insurrection on the US capitol due to extremists and online communication tools were a big part of this (though it was social media mostly). Let's not abstract away what happened to downplay how serious the event was. I don't know what signal should do, but it's strange to be surprised that given a new understanding of the world people would revisit their principles. That's what people should do. People should not be intransigent. Also, personally I don't think signal should compromise the quality of their product though. E2E is too important.
Merman_Mike 6y ago
So the laser beam of outrage has reached Signal. We knew this day was coming. There are people out there who fundamentally believe that no one should be able to think or speak free from their scrutiny.
- cal5k 6y ago
  But - what if the Proud Boys can drink from the same water supply? Something must be done! The American media is a fantastic machine for manufacturing a bogeyman then discarding it once it is no longer useful for narrative purposes.
  - swirepe 6y ago
    I have a list of communists here...
  - um_ya 6y ago
    Say what you want about Trump, but at least he didn't come up with some new "Patriot Act" given the opportunity coronavirus provided. Never let a good disaster go to waste. Seems like free speech is on a tight rope after the "insurrection". Sure didn't waste any time.
    - readflaggedcomm 6y ago
      But the current president did author the original patriot act (the bill it was based on), so there is hope that terrorism can be stopped from spreading on these platforms.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  > So the laser beam of outrage has reached Signal. We knew this day was coming. Next, I seriously expect Amazon and Google at some point to turn on the microphones on all Echo and Home devices and make sure that nobody ever says anything outrageous in their private homes. Failing that, report them to the authorities, or better, doxx them with social media mobs.
avsteele 6y ago
This article is a lot of hot air interleaved with 'concerns' of anonymous people worried that they won't have control over people's speech. It boggles the mind that you could work at Signal and not know that goes with the territory. More cynically, this is may just be battle space prep for the run up to legislation giving the gov a backdoor into any E2E systems. The pretext being 'something something terrorism'.
- 0x262d 6y ago
  Completely agreed. Honestly, I despise the superficially objective and neutral concern troll approach to this. I can't see this article as anything but a dishonest way to say: "what if someone used private communications to do something bad? let's get rid of private communications". Except it doesn't own up to the fact that that's ultimate what it's proposing. It stops at fearmongering. Also, I commented this above, but there's a different way to solve the problems of polarization and radicalism. It involves solving people's material problems, and the US has been slowly getting worse at this and decaying for a while now. Instead, the political establishment is doubling down on surveillance, the silencing of dissent off of any platform with reach, and ultimately physical repression, through the increased funding and militarization of police. Right now this is claimed to be targeted at the far right.. but it doesn't take a genius to compare the police reaction to BLM vs the capitol riot to see where it is going.
  - vagrantJin 6y ago
    I concur. What is surprising to me is that the politicians and bureaucrats seem to think bad actors are supreme idiots. They aren't. The overt nature of a criminal mind whose cloaks themselves in church going taxpayer in suburbia is the reason why no agency in the world can predict tragic acts of domestic terrorism. If someone is going to plan a Charlie hebdo-esque operation, no intelligence can help you. They can just meet at the park for a cold drink and discuss which weapons they are going to use. Intel agencies rely very much on tip offs from civilians and private interests like banks and shops/malls "guy came in looking dodgy and bought a ton of slightly dangerous stuff" kind of thing.
- veeti 6y ago
draklor40 6y ago
Looks like full on propaganda for a smear campaign. "Concerned "Parents" are worried that video games might cause kids to become violent murderers kind. " This is just mainstream media and their lackeys blowing up things out of proportion just to prevent Signal from getting popular.
3gg 6y ago
A nonsense FUD article. Bad actors will always find some way to communicate, and the intelligence failed even when they were doing so openly on mainstream networks. Go crack that nut first before breaking everybody's encryption, the consequences of which are far more detrimental for a free society. Also, it does not hurt to point out that unlike Facebook, which is wired for clicks and "user engagement", Signal does not spread or profit from hate speech and disinformation, which is what got us into recent developments, but rather works like a private chat. So perhaps we have already made some progress by having these people switch over--their recruiting is likely to be severely affected if they rely on Signal for it.
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
In an earlier era (or even today), how would this be different from asking the telephone company to drop calls that are being made by/to "bad actors". Without a warrant compelling them to do so. One difference is tech companies, including "foundations" like Signal, are not federally regulated in the way that telephone companies are.
- notadev 6y ago
  The mechanisms used in the earlier era - law, common sense, etc., have gone out of the window now that anyone can weaponize a social media mob into harassing targets into submission.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
josh2600 6y ago
For change to exist as a possibility in this reality we must have privacy. Freedom of thought, of expression, of association are all predicated on privacy as the space to construct epiphanies into narrative. Absent privacy, change in our world becomes impossible.
baryphonic 6y ago
How is this anything but concern trolling? Or even borderline extortion: "Nice user growth you have there, Signal. Would be a shame if your employees walked out on you." The entire value proposition of Signal is that no one in the middle can see what's going across. The vast majority of those things will be benign or even good. A few will be bad or abusive. People use Twitter, Gmail, Facebook Messenger, Apple Messages and whatever Google is calling their chat client today for good, bad and ugly things, too. I'd have much more respect for Casey Newton (I hope you're reading this) if he disrobed from his pretense and lectured us about Signal being a tool for Orange Man 2.0, rather than this vague whisper campaign about "abuse." And, personally, unless Newton entirely made up his quotes or took them totally out of context, Gregg Bernstein (hope he reads this, too) would have very little shot of making it past a phone screen with me. A former employee trying to stir up my workforce by attacking the core values of my company in the press is not something I look kindly on.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
ngngngng 6y ago
There's a chance that a group of people will walk out into the woods and talk about bad stuff without anyone able to hear them. We should make forests illegal.
- ggrelet 6y ago
  The fundamental difference being: no human actively created forests hence no one could be held responsible (legally or morally) for what's being done there. Edit: wording.
  - ngngngng 6y ago
    So if it was a human reforestation effort then we can hold the people that planted the trees responsible for what happened? What about the park rangers maintaining the forests?
turbinerneiter 6y ago
I predict that at some point there will be a case of gun violence, where the attackers used signal, and it will result in tougher crypto laws but not tougher gun laws.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pensatoio 6y ago
You can’t moderate what you can’t see. That’s the point, fascists. For truly, this article endorses breaking E2E and subduing wrong-think.
kiririn 6y ago
And yet they still have no solution to backup messages, other than running the (Electron!) desktop client 24/7. I don’t want cloud backups, but going as far as force disabling encrypted local iTunes backups is terrible. People expect these to be comprehensive backups and will get a nasty surprise Privacy should not come at the cost of data ownership

100 points by tchalla 6y ago

I wondered when the censors would come for Signal. I'm glad to see Signal is aiming to just be privacy-oriented law-abiding infrastructure.

rzz3 6y ago

There is no battle, one employee may have left. Also this is completely horrifying. Signal with a content policy?! It’s end to end encrypted. Wtf are people trying to do here.

thu2111 6y ago
Right, one guy who isn't even that sure about his own beliefs. I was worried when I read the headline, but the more important thing is that Acton is screening employees to ensure they actually agree with the goals of the organisation. He is clearly able to articulate his own philosophical position on this (focus on bad people, not neutral technologies), and Signal is financially totally dependent on him, which suggests that Signal's philosophy will remain aligned with Acton for the forseeable future. The primary risk to Signal at the moment seems to come from Google and Apple, not internal employee dissent.

diveanon 6y ago

So just out of curiosity for those in defense of unmoderated e2e encrypted coms: When terrorists and cp distributers are using your platform which of your ideals will take precedence?

babesh 6y ago
You mean we should ban encryption on the physical hardware of the Internet? Once there is a mechanism to verify the identity of the other party, those two parties don’t need the platform to do end to end encryption. Each party generates a public/private key pair, does some double encryption magic, and it’s all over. The platform doing this is a convenience. The platform storing this is just giving the government a convenient place to decrypt it once they have coerced the keys from one or more of the parties. I wonder how that would fly with the citizens of other countries that use Signal? Would they be comfortable with the US government reading their messages? Why is the left now so into policies that they decry when done in other countries: social scoring, travel bans, censorship? What is going on? Is the US going through it’s version of China’s Cultural Revolution?
- approxim8ion 6y ago
  Has GP indicated that they are on "the left"? There is a growing idea especially among Americans that all "left" people are authoritarians. It's even funnier because the idea of "terrorists and cp distributors" using encryption to bypass regulation was floated in your Congress was almost verbatim the reasoning behind the EARN IT act, introduced in Senate by Lindsey Graham, whom I hope you don't think is on the left. It went on to receive bipartisan support as well.
  - babesh 6y ago
    Quotes from the article leave that impression. “The app saw a surge in usage during last year’s protests for racial justice, even adding a tool to automatically blur faces in photos to help activists more safely share images of the demonstrations. This kind of growth, one that supported progressive causes, was exciting to Signal’s roughly 30-member team.” “But as the US presidential election grew closer, some Signal employees began raising concerns that group links could be abused. On September 29th, during a debate, President Trump had told the far-right extremist group the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” During an all-hands meeting, an employee asked Marlinspike how the company would respond if a member of the Proud Boys or another extremist organization posted a Signal group chat link publicly in an effort to recruit members and coordinate violence.“ ““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.” ———— You do know that there was also coordinated violence in the BLM protests.
    - approxim8ion 6y ago
      I'm specifically talking about the person you replied to, not the article, which is more of an opinion piece with facts interspersed.
      - babesh 6y ago
        I didn’t say that specific person was left. But yes I should have been more clear. And yes, I know about that bill and that it was supported by Republicans. In fact, I linked to it in an earlier comment prior to your comment.
approxim8ion 6y ago
What are moderated e2ee comms? How do you moderate content you are not expected to have any access to by design? And if the answer is to not have encryption, then when activists or groups that are being actively targeted and threatened need secure communications but find none, who is that on?
girvo 6y ago
If it’s E2E encrypted how do you propose finding out about it? And frankly it’s a near certainty they already do. I know drug dealers do at least.

autoexec 6y ago

I dumped signal less over the data collection they've started doing and more for the fact that they've been less than transparent about it. Nearly a year ago their forums were filled with objections, security concerns, and questions and for months they went ignored. When they finally made setting a pin optional they were equally unclear that it would just set a random one for you and that this didn't prevent your data from being uploaded to the cloud. I took it as a sign that they were telling us not to trust them as clearly as they were allowed. For secure communications I'm using Jami now and I've been very impressed. For SMS/MMS in general I'm still looking. I've tried a few alternatives and frankly I'm not really happy with any of them.

rzz3 6y ago
They’re trying to unwind Signal from phone numbers. Also who uses SMS anymore?:)
- autoexec 6y ago
  The phone number is not even the worst part really. Signal's privacy policy says they don't collect and store sensitive info, but how is a list of everyone you've been in contact with not sensitive? Sadly I've had very little luck getting my family to move to Signal and less luck getting them to use Jami. The bulk of my communications are unsecured SMS/MMS. It's such a basic function that I'm surprised open source solutions aren't better. Whatever they've become Signal had a pretty great interface.
  - tmp538394722 6y ago
    it’s hard for me to read something like this and believe you aren’t being deliberately misleading. All this stuff is only stored in an encrypted form that signal never has the keys for.
    - autoexec 6y ago
      The fact that's encrypted doesn't matter. There are a number of potential issues with collecting it in the first place. You can see some of the security concerns which were brought up on their forums here: https://community.signalusers.org/t/proper-secure-value-security-pins-are-too-easy-to-brute-force-sgx-is-not-reliable-enough/15096 https://community.signalusers.org/t/proper-secure-value-secu...

ekianjo 6y ago

> “The response was: if and when people start abusing Signal or doing things that we think are terrible, we'll say something,” said Bernstein, who was in the meeting, conducted over video chat. “But until something is a reality, Moxie's position is he's not going to deal with it.” > Bernstein (disclosure: a former colleague of mine at Vox Media), added, “You could see a lot of jaws dropping. That’s not a strategy — that’s just hoping things don’t go bad.” So what's the alternative, exactly, when you are supposed to keep things encrypted between users? Either you are a conduit or a publisher, you have to choose.

analyte123 6y ago
They could put virality limiters on content, for example limiting the number of times a message can be forwarded. WhatsApp is known to have done this. They could also let people report users (and unmask their content) and ban them if they get enough reports. They could also push out clientside hash checking of controversial content once they’ve received reports and stop it from propagating there - just get the database from GIFCT. If group membership can be seen by others in the group, they could also take reports of group membership from NGO or government observers and ban everyone in the group. One does not simply chat online.
- artificialLimbs 6y ago
  Yep, they could pull a Whatsapp.
dleslie 6y ago
I'd start by keeping groups private and invite-from-contacts only. Then Signal is no more culpable than any other chat service over which OTR or similar could operate.

kr99x 6y ago

Again I lament the falling respect for and understanding of free speech as a principle that helps us all. Only when communication between two willing parties is unhindered is it even possible to build a just world. The power to clamp down on voluntary communication is a power no authority should ever be trusted with, because there are no examples in the history of mankind where that power is only used for good - arguably there can be no such examples, what with power being a vector for corruption.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
Back when radio was the only mass medium that you could reach entire populations on, would you have argued that anyone with a POV should be able to broadcast over the air, "because free speech" ? Back when there were only 3 TV networks that reached the whole of the US, would you have argued that anyone with a POV should be able to get some time (how long?) on one of those networks, "because free speech" ? Free speech never meant the ability to demand the use of any mechanism or any resource to reach a real or hypothetical audience. Changing the definition because lots of people chat on social media doesn't cut it, I think.
- kr99x 6y ago
  You are badly misunderstanding the situation. A world with 3 TV networks is a world of limited airtime, so of course people will not give their slots up freely for others. That is not the world we are in now. It costs no "space" to let messages of any kind go through your platform. It costs (nearly) no bandwidth. It is generally profitable. The only reason messages are being restricted is because those who control the platform don't like them. A TV network wouldn't give airtime to any old wacko because it was a limited resource. Signal choosing not to give use of their platform to somebody they don't like is categorically different.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    > You are badly misunderstanding the situation. Those radio and TV networks were, before the internet, the only way you could broadcast to the nation, or the city, or the region or whatever. If you wanted to reach many people and not in print, you had to be on them. As you note, this is no longer the case. The resource you want access to is, variously, either the internet itself or (e.g.) Signal's audience. You don't need Signal for the former, and you don't have any constitutional or moral right to the latter.

hacknat 6y ago

How can one even develop a content-policy for something like Signal? Isn't supposed to be impossible for them to ever see your messages anyway?

marketingtech 6y ago

Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25911568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25911568

dannyw 6y ago

Dear Signal: please don’t moderate speech. You should never see my speech, or be in a position to enforce any content policy. The same way USPS doesn’t go around opening letters and getting rid of whatever they don’t like.

tdeck 6y ago
I'm surprised that none of these comment threads are addressing the scenario posed in TFA: > During an all-hands meeting, an employee asked Marlinspike how the company would respond if a member of the Proud Boys or another extremist organization posted a Signal group chat link publicly in an effort to recruit members and coordinate violence. Like it or not, something like this will happen eventually and Signal will become aware of it, if only through the press. It only makes sense to have a policy framework to deal with these things rather than flying by the seat of your pants. Perhaps the policy will be "we won't take down group chats without a court order", or perhaps it will be something else. But to just punt until a link to some folks planning a lynch mob arrives in press@signal.org is irresponsible both to the platform and to the society.
- dleslie 6y ago
  So don't make the chats public and linkable. Make group chats invite-only.
- robjan 6y ago
  There's little they can do since the idea of "group" is stored on the users device. Groups don't exist on Signal servers and they can't see when a message is sent to a group.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    I don't see how the group links feature can work if that's 100% correct. You can't send someone a hyperlink to a phone. Unless these group links are some special protocol that does some sort of P2P link to the creator's phone (which would presumably then have to be on all the time for it to work). More importantly than group links is what happens to Signal when someone realises that they can change people's public keys on a whim. Although the app is supposed to display a notification in that case, they can also change the app on a whim. Fundamentally, I just do not see how Signal's social goals (which are laudable) are compatible with their chosen implementation. Marlinspike's arguments about centralisation vs decentralisation and the moving ecosystem are all valid yet in the end it doesn't matter. He identified a problem and basically ignored the where his chain of logic led, i.e. that he would need to figure out how to keep up with a moving ecosystem in a decentralised way. Otherwise, the end game is easy to anticipate: they bend and start swapping public keys silently, either due to police pressure, or pressure from internal activist employees, or pressure from Google/Apple.

gcblkjaidfj 6y ago

>>> https://element.io/ https://element.io/

mc32 6y ago

Oh, dear. I really can't believe it. I can see any commercial application like What's App or FB or TWTTR being coy about speech and not having the privacy of their users in mind, and bending to prevailing winds --not having fast principles. But Signal? Signal? Do these idealist engineers not envision the comms that can happen on e-e encrypted systems? They don't think criminals, hooligans, spies, unsavory people, sex criminals, drugs dealers, arms dealers, etc. would use the network? Oh, but boy, wait, what if people in whose politics we don't believe in use it? Oh, noes. In this case we have to be careful and raise concerns --but those other things, no, that's why we believe in freedom of speech and e-e encryption. Sigh. They believe in things, until they don't. Which means they don't truly believe in the principles they said they believed in. What's that old saw, I believe in freedom of speech for the people I agree with? Moxie should get up there next time and say: "If you only believe this product should be used by people you agree with, then you took the wrong job". It's like the Komsomol have come to town.

edgyquant 6y ago
This was my thinking as well. Their concerns were ridiculous and echoed what we heard a couple years ago when politicians were looking for mandatory back doors. What did they think the point of encryption was other than to allow people to have discussions without interference. I get it, I’m not a fan of the groups they’re discussing by a long shot, but I’m also not working at a non-profit dedicated to providing the world with safe, encrypted, messaging.
ironman1478 6y ago
I mean, people's views on things should change based on evidence. This isn't 'i disagree with their politics so I need to change the platform to silence them'. There was an insurrection on the US capitol due to extremists and online communication tools were a big part of this (though it was social media mostly). Let's not abstract away what happened to downplay how serious the event was. I don't know what signal should do, but it's strange to be surprised that given a new understanding of the world people would revisit their principles. That's what people should do. People should not be intransigent. Also, personally I don't think signal should compromise the quality of their product though. E2E is too important.

Merman_Mike 6y ago

So the laser beam of outrage has reached Signal. We knew this day was coming. There are people out there who fundamentally believe that no one should be able to think or speak free from their scrutiny.

cal5k 6y ago
But - what if the Proud Boys can drink from the same water supply? Something must be done! The American media is a fantastic machine for manufacturing a bogeyman then discarding it once it is no longer useful for narrative purposes.
- swirepe 6y ago
  I have a list of communists here...
- um_ya 6y ago
  Say what you want about Trump, but at least he didn't come up with some new "Patriot Act" given the opportunity coronavirus provided. Never let a good disaster go to waste. Seems like free speech is on a tight rope after the "insurrection". Sure didn't waste any time.
  - readflaggedcomm 6y ago
    But the current president did author the original patriot act (the bill it was based on), so there is hope that terrorism can be stopped from spreading on these platforms.
ekianjo 6y ago
> So the laser beam of outrage has reached Signal. We knew this day was coming. Next, I seriously expect Amazon and Google at some point to turn on the microphones on all Echo and Home devices and make sure that nobody ever says anything outrageous in their private homes. Failing that, report them to the authorities, or better, doxx them with social media mobs.

avsteele 6y ago

This article is a lot of hot air interleaved with 'concerns' of anonymous people worried that they won't have control over people's speech. It boggles the mind that you could work at Signal and not know that goes with the territory. More cynically, this is may just be battle space prep for the run up to legislation giving the gov a backdoor into any E2E systems. The pretext being 'something something terrorism'.

0x262d 6y ago
Completely agreed. Honestly, I despise the superficially objective and neutral concern troll approach to this. I can't see this article as anything but a dishonest way to say: "what if someone used private communications to do something bad? let's get rid of private communications". Except it doesn't own up to the fact that that's ultimate what it's proposing. It stops at fearmongering. Also, I commented this above, but there's a different way to solve the problems of polarization and radicalism. It involves solving people's material problems, and the US has been slowly getting worse at this and decaying for a while now. Instead, the political establishment is doubling down on surveillance, the silencing of dissent off of any platform with reach, and ultimately physical repression, through the increased funding and militarization of police. Right now this is claimed to be targeted at the far right.. but it doesn't take a genius to compare the police reaction to BLM vs the capitol riot to see where it is going.
- vagrantJin 6y ago
  I concur. What is surprising to me is that the politicians and bureaucrats seem to think bad actors are supreme idiots. They aren't. The overt nature of a criminal mind whose cloaks themselves in church going taxpayer in suburbia is the reason why no agency in the world can predict tragic acts of domestic terrorism. If someone is going to plan a Charlie hebdo-esque operation, no intelligence can help you. They can just meet at the park for a cold drink and discuss which weapons they are going to use. Intel agencies rely very much on tip offs from civilians and private interests like banks and shops/malls "guy came in looking dodgy and bought a ton of slightly dangerous stuff" kind of thing.
veeti 6y ago

draklor40 6y ago

Looks like full on propaganda for a smear campaign. "Concerned "Parents" are worried that video games might cause kids to become violent murderers kind. " This is just mainstream media and their lackeys blowing up things out of proportion just to prevent Signal from getting popular.

3gg 6y ago

A nonsense FUD article. Bad actors will always find some way to communicate, and the intelligence failed even when they were doing so openly on mainstream networks. Go crack that nut first before breaking everybody's encryption, the consequences of which are far more detrimental for a free society. Also, it does not hurt to point out that unlike Facebook, which is wired for clicks and "user engagement", Signal does not spread or profit from hate speech and disinformation, which is what got us into recent developments, but rather works like a private chat. So perhaps we have already made some progress by having these people switch over--their recruiting is likely to be severely affected if they rely on Signal for it.

1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago

In an earlier era (or even today), how would this be different from asking the telephone company to drop calls that are being made by/to "bad actors". Without a warrant compelling them to do so. One difference is tech companies, including "foundations" like Signal, are not federally regulated in the way that telephone companies are.

notadev 6y ago
The mechanisms used in the earlier era - law, common sense, etc., have gone out of the window now that anyone can weaponize a social media mob into harassing targets into submission.

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josh2600 6y ago

For change to exist as a possibility in this reality we must have privacy. Freedom of thought, of expression, of association are all predicated on privacy as the space to construct epiphanies into narrative. Absent privacy, change in our world becomes impossible.

baryphonic 6y ago

How is this anything but concern trolling? Or even borderline extortion: "Nice user growth you have there, Signal. Would be a shame if your employees walked out on you." The entire value proposition of Signal is that no one in the middle can see what's going across. The vast majority of those things will be benign or even good. A few will be bad or abusive. People use Twitter, Gmail, Facebook Messenger, Apple Messages and whatever Google is calling their chat client today for good, bad and ugly things, too. I'd have much more respect for Casey Newton (I hope you're reading this) if he disrobed from his pretense and lectured us about Signal being a tool for Orange Man 2.0, rather than this vague whisper campaign about "abuse." And, personally, unless Newton entirely made up his quotes or took them totally out of context, Gregg Bernstein (hope he reads this, too) would have very little shot of making it past a phone screen with me. A former employee trying to stir up my workforce by attacking the core values of my company in the press is not something I look kindly on.

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ngngngng 6y ago

There's a chance that a group of people will walk out into the woods and talk about bad stuff without anyone able to hear them. We should make forests illegal.

ggrelet 6y ago
The fundamental difference being: no human actively created forests hence no one could be held responsible (legally or morally) for what's being done there. Edit: wording.
- ngngngng 6y ago
  So if it was a human reforestation effort then we can hold the people that planted the trees responsible for what happened? What about the park rangers maintaining the forests?

turbinerneiter 6y ago

I predict that at some point there will be a case of gun violence, where the attackers used signal, and it will result in tougher crypto laws but not tougher gun laws.

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pensatoio 6y ago

You can’t moderate what you can’t see. That’s the point, fascists. For truly, this article endorses breaking E2E and subduing wrong-think.

kiririn 6y ago

And yet they still have no solution to backup messages, other than running the (Electron!) desktop client 24/7. I don’t want cloud backups, but going as far as force disabling encrypted local iTunes backups is terrible. People expect these to be comprehensive backups and will get a nasty surprise Privacy should not come at the cost of data ownership