| Raises the more interesting question of what is sufficient collateral for a developer to make a secure messenger. Before Snowden/Poitras/Greewald, we trusted Moxie Marlinspike mostly because of his dreadlocks and some conference appearances. Very, very, few people understood what a ratchet was, let alone read the code. We trusted founders Jan and Brian of WhatsApp I think because they wrote t-filez. Security is in many ways cultural and aesthetic as it is technical. SILC was a thing for people legitimately being spied on by their governments in the pre-occupy anti-globalization movement - and then suddenly it wasn't. I want a product like this to succeed, so why snark about these perfectly nice seeming people's new tool? Because security has serious consequences. We don't need to tell anyone what we need privacy for, but I think we're still lacking a clear "for what," to evaluate privacy technologies against. The threat we need to build privacy tools against is essentially suburban-bourgeois and mob governance. When you look at old "alternative" culture, or why people still go to things like burning man today, it's to engage in what are essentially aesthetic communities of desire and to be free of political oversight and surveillance. The criteria I would propose for a secure messenger is that it can create a private perimeter to facilitate the freedom of something like burning man for a community of users. If it isn't designed to create that kind of growth, it's a reaction with a limited horizon and just bargaining with the inevitable. Personally I think a privacy product that is for everyone is necessarily for no one. Maybe this is the one that gets used by the next burner-level community to emerge, but the conversation about what-for will be the thing that drives the adoption of it. |
no, that’s exactly wrong in ways that really matter, distracting us from real threats to free and fair living, which are exertions of power by large organizations (including governments) and wealthy (influential) people (including politicians).
the focus on the capitol disturbance is exactly this kind of distraction as well, trying to vilify the relatively powerless while the real ‘villains’ (to satirize) ratchet up their hold on power and insulate themselves further from consequences and answerability to their constituent stakeholders.
we should not be looking askance at each other, but rather askance at anyone trying to garner power and influence. the balance of power has no lasting stable mode so we as citizens must keep tabs on power. the last 50+ years has been a slow neglect of that duty, allowing ourselves to be distracted by all the new shinies.