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> The motivations that led to end-to-end encryption going mainstream lie far out on the political fringe. The original impetus for Marlinspike’s entry into cryp

> The motivations that led to end-to-end encryption going mainstream lie far out on the political fringe. The original impetus for Marlinspike’s entry into cryptography, around 2007, was to challenge existing power structures, particularly the injustice of how (as he put it) “Internet insecurity is used by people I don’t like against people I do: the government against the people.” But sticking to anarchism would imply an almost certain defeat. What a reflection of the massive political shift from individual liberty and 'all men are created equal', for which privacy is necessary, to compliance with power. Now that's "far out on the political fringe" and even "anarchy"? I know most people don't think philosophically about it, but Signal's principles are pretty mainstream American (and probably other free countries), afaik - or knew? EDIT: > Signal has managed to maintain an unusual focus on the autonomy of the individual, a wariness of state authority, and an aversion to making money, characteristics that are recognizably anarchist. Doesn't that describe, to different degrees, a great many open source projects? Mozilla? BSDs? etc? EDIT2: I think that's what the article really is about: The author's theory that this sort of vision is utopian, very fringe, and therefore impossible. It's pretty shocking to see it in Wired, which once led in exploring, beliving in, and bringing to the world's (or its readers') attention exceptional innovations well beyond the conceptions of the norm. Now they doubt such things ipso facto. Nobody seems to remark on the extraordinary reactionary philosophy that is flooding the public space, the antithisis of creativity, freedom, innovation, and 'intellectual curiosity'.

throwayay583739 3y ago
> Doesn't that describe, to different degrees, a great many open source projects? Mozilla? BSDs? etc? Or a lot of englightenment political theory about democracy and republicanism and the rule of law that all lie at the roots of most modern states? It's one thing to meet with refutation of this philosophy. It's another thing to meet with the wired article author's incredulity & astonishment at these well established ideas.
mc32 3y ago
Not to be Debbie downer but there’s been a cultural shift in the liberal establishment over the years away from protecting speech, even hateful speech to actively espousing and advocating for censorship. It’s clear that principles can shift over time and Wired is toeing the line.
- barbazoo 3y ago
  It's a problem across the spectrum. "Don't say gay" and the whole book banning business across the US come to mind. Is there legislation anywhere implementing "left wing censorship"?
  - mc32 3y ago
    That was about introducing sex ed to third graders. Have third graders put down their toy cars, dolls and blocks yet? And then you have a Cal governor suinf a school dist demanding they teach the curriculum he believes is correct. So you have an example of two governors, one on each side, tellig districts what to teach But, the thing is, liberals _used_ _to_ espouse free speech as long as it was legal and defended it to the death, so to speak. Conservatives, well, they were conservative and were more on the "decency" argument but today that is reversed and the liberals are tending more autocratic than the conservatives.
    - katbyte 3y ago
      That may have been the intent (which I seriously doubt) but in practice it means teachers cannot even mention their same sex partners or even that gay/trans people exist because that could be considered “sex ex” by a parent who doesn’t want their children to know gay people exist (and for the record it is not sex ed) Hence the use of the phrase “don’t say gay”
      - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
        I would government employees to not talk about sex, their partners, their bedrooms, and all manner of topics to 5-9 year old kids.
        mrguyorama 3y ago
        That bill would penalize the teacher if their gay significant other brought their forgotten lunch to school, the kids asked "who was that", and the teacher attempted any answer. It has nothing to do with sex. Republicans in florida have quite clearly criminalized same sex couples doing normal things.
gcanyon 3y ago
There's a case to be made that encryption/private communication has gone through the same sort of progress as personal weaponry has, only on a much shorter time frame and to a much greater extent. In weaponry, it's taken ~200 years to go from bespoke muskets with a firing rate of a couple rounds per minute to semi-automatic and automatic weapons capable of firing multiple rounds per second. In just the last 20-30 years we've gone from "if the government wants to know your speech, they are a warrant(-ish) away from getting it" to "as long as you don't make a mistake, no one will ever know what you said." To be clear, I'm not advocating for encryption restrictions. I'm just saying that almost no one advocates for the 2nd amendment right to a bazooka, and it could reasonably be argued that a bazooka isn't remotely equivalent to the present ability of just about anyone to conceal their speech.
- komali2 3y ago
  > I'm just saying that almost no one advocates for the 2nd amendment right to a bazooka This isn't necessarily true. To believe that the 2nd amendment allows the right to carry a concealed weapon basically anywhere sort of requires one to believe every citizen has the right to carry any weapon. The amendment is meant to indicate that congress simply can't regulate whether citizens choose to own and carry around weapons, and what sort of weapons those might be. If the weapon could be considered an "arm," it can't be regulated. This is one of the obvious modern flaws with the USA constitution and why the 2nd amendment should be abolished before any reasonable gun control can happen in the USA. Kavanaugh and other justices right now seem to think that there are "of course" conditions and restrictions that should be allowed, like not carrying guns into "sensitive places" or not allowing felons to have guns, but a future justice can simply disagree, and that's that. Also, many people in the USA believe they should be allowed to have a bazooka.
  - catiopatio 3y ago
    I absolutely believe I should be able to own a bazooka, and that the second and first amendments are equally critical for a free state. People use exactly the same arguments you’re making to justify speech restrictions. It’s my belief that there’s an underlying social pathology wherein some people are happy to hand power to the state in order to feel safe, regardless of the ultimate consequences, whether we’re discussing arms or speech or any other fundamental right.
tptacek 3y ago
The authors of the Declaration of Independence are also the authors of the Constitution, premised in part on English Common Law, in which the public is entitled to every man's evidence.
- schoen 3y ago
  I think "entitled to every man's evidence" means that there is a compulsory subpoena power to make people testify. One can call a hostile witness, and in the absence of a corresponding privilege against testifying, the witness can be punished for refusing to testify, as a contemnor (or for testifying falsely, as a perjuror). This idea is distinct from search and covert eavesdropping powers, which may have also existed at common law but perhaps not under that same principle?
  - tptacek 3y ago
    Yeah, I don't think the public claim to every person's evidence vindicates dragnet surveillance! I think these are complicated issues, we can make our own policy decisions and we can find a right to privacy even if one didn't exist at the time of the founders. I'm just reacting to the notion that we've departed from the principles of the founders by giving law enforcement access to evidence. My impression, from the bit of reading I've done, is that wouldn't have shocked the conscience of the founders at all.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  I'm not sure how you mean to apply that idea. If you mean that it balances the right of privacy, that seems like a stretch to apply to encryption. My evidence might be in my head, for example. Nothing stops me from burning records unless they already are potential evidence in an active case. I could delete this comment.
skybrian 3y ago
Yes, Wired was originally pretty libertarian, but that was a long time ago. I don’t know what it’s like now. As for what’s mainstream American, people disagree. Historically, we’re a pretty unruly people. Still are, sometimes. But here is the Fourth Amendment: > The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. (Emphasis added.) You can argue about whether that should also apply to secure online communications, but the idea that there are compromises between state power and individual rights is pretty fundamental to US law.
- autoexec 3y ago
  We've seen example after example of the Fourth Amendment being trampled all over with zero consequences. Why bother arguing over possible edge cases (and I personally don't see any reason online communications wouldn't be covered) when there are no meaningful consequences for even the most cut and dry violations. Like, why argue the finer points of a right that we effectively don't have?
  - skybrian 3y ago
    In a large country, I think it could be true that there are many violations of a rule, and at the same time, the rule is often enforced and is doing some good. I haven’t researched it, though.
    - kelnos 3y ago
      And on top of that, for the most part we only hear about the violations. The rule being followed won't make the news. That doesn't mean the violations are acceptable, of course.
cempaka 3y ago
Only Nixon could go to China, and only Obama could normalize total mass surveillance.
r00fus 3y ago
Follow the money - Wired is a Condé Nast property (for some time) which is in turn, owned by Advance Publications, one of the largest media conglomerates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications
safety1st 3y ago
What sets the modern era apart from the rest of human history is that Marlinspike's ideas are radical yet commonplace at the same time. He's in the company of people like Thomas Jefferson who advocated the idea of permanent revolution, or that the rebellion against unjust government would never end. It would keep on happening through the ballot box. That is what democracy is. It is continuous small, non-violent revolutions against the government. This is quite different from almost every prior form of social system in human history and it's arguably the single largest idea which has contributed to lifting humanity out of poverty, war, oppression and misery (the scientific method is a very close competitor for that distinction, but without permanent revolution most scientists probably would have been burned at the stake or ignored). There will always be people - the powerful, the entrenched, and maybe just the ill-informed, cowardly or intellectually lazy - who are terrified by the notion of permanent revolution, so to them it's radical. (One wonders what camp this writer falls in, because usually journalists are well aware of this stuff, for many it's their raison d'etre. Has this one taken a civics class? Do they believe Jefferson was arguing for anarchy? If so have they looked up the definition of that word in a dictionary?) But despite the fears of those people, permanent revolution is the secret sauce modern society is built upon. Western civilization has a long line of prominent thinkers and historical examples which has led to this way of organizing ourselves. It is precious and it is still new and if we lose it we might never get it back again. Anyway, I like the argument that Signal's CEO makes here [1], which is that for virtually all of human history, privacy has been the default. The Constitution was written before the invention of the telegram. At that point in history you could always go into a room alone with someone else, have a conversation, and be reasonably assured that the conversation was private. Bugs and wires didn't exist. Wiretapping didn't exist, surveillance didn't exist unless you had a third human physically present. This makes privacy akin to a natural right, something we have always had, that we are entitled to by nature of being human. I'm of the view that the US needs a Constitutional amendment to protect it, and if any government seeks to deny it we should give them a reminder of what permanent revolution is and show them how it works. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E--bVV_eQR0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E--bVV_eQR0
- bombolo 3y ago
  I remember, as a young italian studying about risorgimento, asking my mother why did the people in venice and milan not want to be under the austrian empire. My mum told me "it was an oppressive government". When I asked to elaborate she said "they used to read people's mails so that they knew whom to arrest." In italy you can end up in jail if you open mails… and yet somehow we are completely ok with the government reading every electronic communication?
gorgoiler 3y ago
In a previous era of journalism an article such as this one would include comment, if there was one, from Whisper themselves. There are quotes in there but they are ones reported by other journalists for other articles. That’s fine — it’s what editorial is after all — but it could have been made clearer.
didntcheck 3y ago
Yeah. It's been sad to see how far we've fallen back, in the 10 years since Snowden. I'd argue we've gone even further than regressing, with an outspoken support for civil liberties and healthy skepticism of authorities being seen as not merely "kooky", but increasingly "harmful to society" I was hoping to maybe be able to skirt around it, but I think it's unavoidable to discuss this without explicitly saying: the concerning part is that it's increasingly the left doing this. When I was younger I used to be able to rely on that side of the spectrum to be at the forefront of calling out creeping authority like that, which should be unsurprising, given their core philosophy. Yet in the past 5 or so years they seem determined to throw that away and declare that a healthy distrust of the government is in fact a right-wing-exclusive thing, for some reason. Strange self-sabotage, and especially strange when it manifests as people of that affiliation implicitly (or explicitly) praising alphabet agencies

throwayay583739 3y ago

> Doesn't that describe, to different degrees, a great many open source projects? Mozilla? BSDs? etc? Or a lot of englightenment political theory about democracy and republicanism and the rule of law that all lie at the roots of most modern states? It's one thing to meet with refutation of this philosophy. It's another thing to meet with the wired article author's incredulity & astonishment at these well established ideas.

mc32 3y ago

Not to be Debbie downer but there’s been a cultural shift in the liberal establishment over the years away from protecting speech, even hateful speech to actively espousing and advocating for censorship. It’s clear that principles can shift over time and Wired is toeing the line.

barbazoo 3y ago
It's a problem across the spectrum. "Don't say gay" and the whole book banning business across the US come to mind. Is there legislation anywhere implementing "left wing censorship"?
- mc32 3y ago
  That was about introducing sex ed to third graders. Have third graders put down their toy cars, dolls and blocks yet? And then you have a Cal governor suinf a school dist demanding they teach the curriculum he believes is correct. So you have an example of two governors, one on each side, tellig districts what to teach But, the thing is, liberals _used_ _to_ espouse free speech as long as it was legal and defended it to the death, so to speak. Conservatives, well, they were conservative and were more on the "decency" argument but today that is reversed and the liberals are tending more autocratic than the conservatives.
  - katbyte 3y ago
    That may have been the intent (which I seriously doubt) but in practice it means teachers cannot even mention their same sex partners or even that gay/trans people exist because that could be considered “sex ex” by a parent who doesn’t want their children to know gay people exist (and for the record it is not sex ed) Hence the use of the phrase “don’t say gay”
    - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
      I would government employees to not talk about sex, their partners, their bedrooms, and all manner of topics to 5-9 year old kids.
      - mrguyorama 3y ago
        That bill would penalize the teacher if their gay significant other brought their forgotten lunch to school, the kids asked "who was that", and the teacher attempted any answer. It has nothing to do with sex. Republicans in florida have quite clearly criminalized same sex couples doing normal things.

gcanyon 3y ago

There's a case to be made that encryption/private communication has gone through the same sort of progress as personal weaponry has, only on a much shorter time frame and to a much greater extent. In weaponry, it's taken ~200 years to go from bespoke muskets with a firing rate of a couple rounds per minute to semi-automatic and automatic weapons capable of firing multiple rounds per second. In just the last 20-30 years we've gone from "if the government wants to know your speech, they are a warrant(-ish) away from getting it" to "as long as you don't make a mistake, no one will ever know what you said." To be clear, I'm not advocating for encryption restrictions. I'm just saying that almost no one advocates for the 2nd amendment right to a bazooka, and it could reasonably be argued that a bazooka isn't remotely equivalent to the present ability of just about anyone to conceal their speech.

komali2 3y ago
> I'm just saying that almost no one advocates for the 2nd amendment right to a bazooka This isn't necessarily true. To believe that the 2nd amendment allows the right to carry a concealed weapon basically anywhere sort of requires one to believe every citizen has the right to carry any weapon. The amendment is meant to indicate that congress simply can't regulate whether citizens choose to own and carry around weapons, and what sort of weapons those might be. If the weapon could be considered an "arm," it can't be regulated. This is one of the obvious modern flaws with the USA constitution and why the 2nd amendment should be abolished before any reasonable gun control can happen in the USA. Kavanaugh and other justices right now seem to think that there are "of course" conditions and restrictions that should be allowed, like not carrying guns into "sensitive places" or not allowing felons to have guns, but a future justice can simply disagree, and that's that. Also, many people in the USA believe they should be allowed to have a bazooka.
- catiopatio 3y ago
  I absolutely believe I should be able to own a bazooka, and that the second and first amendments are equally critical for a free state. People use exactly the same arguments you’re making to justify speech restrictions. It’s my belief that there’s an underlying social pathology wherein some people are happy to hand power to the state in order to feel safe, regardless of the ultimate consequences, whether we’re discussing arms or speech or any other fundamental right.

tptacek 3y ago

The authors of the Declaration of Independence are also the authors of the Constitution, premised in part on English Common Law, in which the public is entitled to every man's evidence.

schoen 3y ago
I think "entitled to every man's evidence" means that there is a compulsory subpoena power to make people testify. One can call a hostile witness, and in the absence of a corresponding privilege against testifying, the witness can be punished for refusing to testify, as a contemnor (or for testifying falsely, as a perjuror). This idea is distinct from search and covert eavesdropping powers, which may have also existed at common law but perhaps not under that same principle?
- tptacek 3y ago
  Yeah, I don't think the public claim to every person's evidence vindicates dragnet surveillance! I think these are complicated issues, we can make our own policy decisions and we can find a right to privacy even if one didn't exist at the time of the founders. I'm just reacting to the notion that we've departed from the principles of the founders by giving law enforcement access to evidence. My impression, from the bit of reading I've done, is that wouldn't have shocked the conscience of the founders at all.
wolverine876 3y ago
I'm not sure how you mean to apply that idea. If you mean that it balances the right of privacy, that seems like a stretch to apply to encryption. My evidence might be in my head, for example. Nothing stops me from burning records unless they already are potential evidence in an active case. I could delete this comment.

skybrian 3y ago

Yes, Wired was originally pretty libertarian, but that was a long time ago. I don’t know what it’s like now. As for what’s mainstream American, people disagree. Historically, we’re a pretty unruly people. Still are, sometimes. But here is the Fourth Amendment: > The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. (Emphasis added.) You can argue about whether that should also apply to secure online communications, but the idea that there are compromises between state power and individual rights is pretty fundamental to US law.

autoexec 3y ago
We've seen example after example of the Fourth Amendment being trampled all over with zero consequences. Why bother arguing over possible edge cases (and I personally don't see any reason online communications wouldn't be covered) when there are no meaningful consequences for even the most cut and dry violations. Like, why argue the finer points of a right that we effectively don't have?
- skybrian 3y ago
  In a large country, I think it could be true that there are many violations of a rule, and at the same time, the rule is often enforced and is doing some good. I haven’t researched it, though.
  - kelnos 3y ago
    And on top of that, for the most part we only hear about the violations. The rule being followed won't make the news. That doesn't mean the violations are acceptable, of course.

cempaka 3y ago

Only Nixon could go to China, and only Obama could normalize total mass surveillance.

r00fus 3y ago

Follow the money - Wired is a Condé Nast property (for some time) which is in turn, owned by Advance Publications, one of the largest media conglomerates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications

safety1st 3y ago

What sets the modern era apart from the rest of human history is that Marlinspike's ideas are radical yet commonplace at the same time. He's in the company of people like Thomas Jefferson who advocated the idea of permanent revolution, or that the rebellion against unjust government would never end. It would keep on happening through the ballot box. That is what democracy is. It is continuous small, non-violent revolutions against the government. This is quite different from almost every prior form of social system in human history and it's arguably the single largest idea which has contributed to lifting humanity out of poverty, war, oppression and misery (the scientific method is a very close competitor for that distinction, but without permanent revolution most scientists probably would have been burned at the stake or ignored). There will always be people - the powerful, the entrenched, and maybe just the ill-informed, cowardly or intellectually lazy - who are terrified by the notion of permanent revolution, so to them it's radical. (One wonders what camp this writer falls in, because usually journalists are well aware of this stuff, for many it's their raison d'etre. Has this one taken a civics class? Do they believe Jefferson was arguing for anarchy? If so have they looked up the definition of that word in a dictionary?) But despite the fears of those people, permanent revolution is the secret sauce modern society is built upon. Western civilization has a long line of prominent thinkers and historical examples which has led to this way of organizing ourselves. It is precious and it is still new and if we lose it we might never get it back again. Anyway, I like the argument that Signal's CEO makes here [1], which is that for virtually all of human history, privacy has been the default. The Constitution was written before the invention of the telegram. At that point in history you could always go into a room alone with someone else, have a conversation, and be reasonably assured that the conversation was private. Bugs and wires didn't exist. Wiretapping didn't exist, surveillance didn't exist unless you had a third human physically present. This makes privacy akin to a natural right, something we have always had, that we are entitled to by nature of being human. I'm of the view that the US needs a Constitutional amendment to protect it, and if any government seeks to deny it we should give them a reminder of what permanent revolution is and show them how it works. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E--bVV_eQR0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E--bVV_eQR0

bombolo 3y ago
I remember, as a young italian studying about risorgimento, asking my mother why did the people in venice and milan not want to be under the austrian empire. My mum told me "it was an oppressive government". When I asked to elaborate she said "they used to read people's mails so that they knew whom to arrest." In italy you can end up in jail if you open mails… and yet somehow we are completely ok with the government reading every electronic communication?

gorgoiler 3y ago

In a previous era of journalism an article such as this one would include comment, if there was one, from Whisper themselves. There are quotes in there but they are ones reported by other journalists for other articles. That’s fine — it’s what editorial is after all — but it could have been made clearer.

didntcheck 3y ago

Yeah. It's been sad to see how far we've fallen back, in the 10 years since Snowden. I'd argue we've gone even further than regressing, with an outspoken support for civil liberties and healthy skepticism of authorities being seen as not merely "kooky", but increasingly "harmful to society" I was hoping to maybe be able to skirt around it, but I think it's unavoidable to discuss this without explicitly saying: the concerning part is that it's increasingly the left doing this. When I was younger I used to be able to rely on that side of the spectrum to be at the forefront of calling out creeping authority like that, which should be unsurprising, given their core philosophy. Yet in the past 5 or so years they seem determined to throw that away and declare that a healthy distrust of the government is in fact a right-wing-exclusive thing, for some reason. Strange self-sabotage, and especially strange when it manifests as people of that affiliation implicitly (or explicitly) praising alphabet agencies