Whether it’s attacks from the right or left, internet privacy and security is a hot political potato these days.
During the Trump Administration, there were widespread concerns that ANTIFA and other such groups were organizing online to commit street violence, and likewise media figures and the Biden Administration have voiced increasing alarm that right-wing extremist groups can operate on instant messaging and social media apps like Discord, Telegram and WhatsApp.
In the current environment, an unlikely player has emerged into greater public consciousness: Signal.
The instant messaging app, which had only 20 million members in Dec. 2020, has exploded in popularity in January, growing by millions after Jan. 4. This comes as WhatsApp, a popular instant-messenger owned by Facebook, decided to update its terms of service requiring users to allow the app to share data with Facebook or stop using the service. While Facebook has maintained that this will not mean the company can read their messages, as they will still be end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) many of the app’s users have, purportedly, jumped ship anyway.
Encryption is just any technology that uses a code, generally mathematical, to scramble data so that it is unreadable to anyone without an encryption key. Think of spies in the field who might send secret messages by way of a code. E2EE, despite popular belief, is not hack proof, but it does, in principle, allow communications to be sent over servers that you yourself do not own while at the same time being unreadable to those who own the servers (the things that direct and store data traffic on a network). That’s good news for anyone who doesn’t own their own computer server, i.e. basically everyone. These systems work by sharing keys between devices that the owner of the server (Facebook let’s say) doesn’t have access to. You send data through their servers, but Facebook couldn’t read that data even if they wanted to—because they don’t have the key.
Ironically, the E2EE software that WhatsApp uses is the same open-source tool that Signal uses. Fundamentally, however, it seems that WhatsApp users don’t trust Facebook to keep their promises and are ditching the service and headed to Signal, especially in countries like India where the BBC reports downloads of Signal spiked from around 12,000 to 2.7 million.
There is also, of course, the elephant in the room. What else happened in early January? Following the riots in D.C. on Jan. 6, there have been concerted efforts by tech companies to increase moderation and crackdown on services used by right-wing extremists. It seems plausible, at least, that some of that traffic is headed to Signal.
This prompted Casey Newton, writing in The Verge, to examine Signal in its political context. His article points out that Signal has basically no plan to moderate content sent through its servers and is sticking strongly to a policy of privacy-absolutism, which has alienated some employees of the non-profit company. He also draws attention to the fact that Signal is used by a diverse assortment of social activists and political dissidents, from Black Lives Matter protesters to journalists and informants in repressive regimes, not just right-wing extremists.
Whereas Newton strikes an alarmist tone about Signal’s lack of a plan for content moderation, relying on testimony from a former user researcher for the company that dissents from the current management’s philosophy, I’m tempted to be alarmed in the other direction. Say what you will for WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption services, the mere fact that the service is owned by Facebook would raise my eyebrows if I was interested in keeping my private communications away from prying eyes and ears.
Those who purvey tools that allow the general public easy access to encryption services should be wary, no doubt. Even unencrypted networks can be used to carry out terrorist attacks and other atrocities that might not have been possible otherwise. For example, evidence has emerged that the military of Myanmar used an information warfare campaign on Facebook to stoke racial tensions and facilitate ethnic cleansing of the country’s Rohingya Muslim population. Likewise, fears that terrorists will use services like Signal to plan and carry out attacks, where company moderators can’t possibly read user communications to know ahead of time, are not unreasonable. While Signal does require a phone number, it need not be the number attached to the SIM card of a device, meaning a potential radical could use a burner phone’s number to activate and maintain an encrypted communication channel.
However, this is just another crossroads where the American public is going to be forced to choose: security or liberty. After the Snowden leaks concerning the sheer breadth of the government’s campaign of surveillance against U.S. citizens, and ever-increasing, creepy intrusions from tech companies in the form of things like predictive advertising, some Americans became comfortable with the idea of having basically no privacy. “I’m a law-abiding citizen. I have nothing to hide. The government can spy on me if they want.” You wouldn’t say that if men-in-black were bugging your bedroom, and yet keeping your phone on the bedside table is basically the same thing.
Are apps like Signal really secure? Honestly, I wouldn’t trust anything short of owning your own server. But maybe I’m a paranoiac. All I know is that just like the Postal Service isn’t supposed to be able to open your mail, Google and Facebook (let alone the Feds) shouldn’t be allowed to go willy-nilly snooping through your private communications. It shouldn’t be that only terrorists and undercover agents want to keep their private communications private, everyone should want that! And people should have a right to it.
That’s why I’m glad Signal is doing well, and I hope its staff maintain their stance in favor of user privacy. Just because people committing heinous crimes will use E2EE services, doesn’t mean they are ipso facto bad. A society with a healthy culture of actually respecting privacy would know that.
Photo Credit / Britannica
