| The article explains that courts have concluded these Acts in particular don't give the government carte blanche, it doesn't get to destroy your business to achieve its goals under the Acts, and obviously allowing wiretapping in Signal's app that exists specifically so that they nobody can wiretap you would destroy Open Whisper Systems' business. So Facebook's Messenger is made more vulnerable by the fact that "Also the government can't wiretap this" isn't a prominently advertised feature. In fact, prior to this article if you'd asked if they can do so I'd have guessed "Yes" and recommended Signal instead. Why not set up your own infrastructure? Well that does come with a significant downside. "Don't Stand Out" is one of the principles we've learned is important for real world communications security. Once you set up your own secure systems, while everybody else keeps using Messenger, you are marked out, your communications label themselves as especially interesting. So _once you do that_ you have to be sure that two things are true: 1. Your technical systems are 100% secure. No adversary has a backdoor to your GPU firmware, a laser microphone listening to your keypresses, a black bag team who can break in and silently copy your data when you're out shopping, a zero day exploit for your browser, or whatever. If your adversary is "Bob from next door" this seems plausible. But if it's the government of your country you are probably in deep shit immediately. 2. Your society has both norms and strongly enforced laws that will ensure it's not just easier and cheaper to bypass all this technology and get what they want from you anyway. But so long as you Don't Stand Out all this fades into the background. If we make _everybody's_ communications secure, yours won't Stand Out and a powerful adversary (such as the US Government) can't target you. |