3 ms·
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 arou
by 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 agoI'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 agoSo don't make the chats public and linkable. Make group chats invite-only.
- robjan 6y agoThere'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 agoI 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.
- ac29 6y agoThe CEO agrees, per the article: "Marlinspike’s response, he told me in a conversation last week, was rooted in the idea that because Signal employees cannot see the content on their network, the app does not need a robust content policy."
- bigiain 6y agoIt would have been good if that had then continued with something like@: “what we do need is good tools for users to be able to control who gets to communicate with them on Signal”. Which it quite likely did, but the author chose to take only the first bit out of context to fit their chosen narrative... I don’t want Signal to moderate my chats in any way at all. I do want my friends/family to easily be able to only choose to receive messages sent by people they wish to hear from. Which is, at least so far, exactly how things are. I guess these new “group chat links” make a difference, but it’s not like you are ever forced to click and join such a group. I don’t want the internet to be censored or shut down just because some people choose to participate in 4chan/8kun...
- swirepe 6y ago>The same way USPS doesn’t go around opening letters and getting rid of whatever they don’t like. Bad news...
- etaioinshrdlu 6y agoThe USPS is prohibited from opening mail between US people. I guess there are exceptions and warrants, but it’s generally true. They scan the outside and sometimes X Ray the mail though...
- radicaldreamer 6y agoOnly certain classes of mail, not parcels and whatnot
- ryukafalz 6y agoOP said letters, which I'm pretty sure are protected like that?
- boomboomsubban 6y agoThere's also the fact that various federal agencies used to completely ignore such restrictions, I wouldn't have any faith that it is generally true. Plus, "they only freely open mail from out of country" transfers really poorly to Signal.
- garmaine 6y ago> I guess there are exceptions and warrants, That’s the entire point though, right? The politicians and law enforcement agencies want a way to provide those same exceptions for encrypted communications.
- garmaine 6y ago> The same way USPS doesn’t go around opening letters and getting rid of whatever they don’t like. Bad example because the USPS can and does use x-rays, Geiger counters, and sniffing dogs to inspect packages without actually opening them. No analogous tooling exists for encrypted messages.
- dleslie 6y agoThere's routing information, payload size information and temporal information; without reading the message, an adversary could determine where (possibly who) the message is going/coming from, and when it was in transit, and how big it was. That's enough to start modelling.
- minitech 6y agoNo risks analogous to the ones detected by those tools exist for encrypted messages.
- jerry1979 6y agoThere's always peeking into sgx enclaves...