Signal

Harris is Prsident and is not. She was Border Czar and was not. 

A woman for all seasons.

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France’s high-speed rail network was hit Friday with widespread and “criminal” acts of vandalism including arson attacks, paralyzing travel to Paris from across the rest of France and Europe only hours before the grand opening ceremony of the Olympics.

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Signal 

The Signal Foundation, created in 2017 with $50m in funding from WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, exists to “protect free expression and enable secure global communication through open source privacy technology”.
It took over the development of its messaging app, also called Signal, in 2018, Meridith Whittaker came on board in the newly created role of president in 2022 – just in time to begin defending Signal, and encryption in general, against a wave of attacks from nation states and companies around the world.
“Through the 80s, there’s deep unease about the idea that the NSA [US National Security Agency] and GCHQ would lose the monopoly on encryption, and by the 90s, it ends up controlled under arms treaties – this is the ‘crypto wars’. You couldn’t send your code in the mail to someone in Europe; it was considered a munitions export,” Whittaker said.
Surveillance, she says, was a “disease” from the very beginning of the internet, and encryption is “deeply threatening to the type of power that constitutes itself via these information asymmetries”.
All this means that she doesn’t expect the fight to end soon. “I don’t think these arguments are in good faith. There’s a deeper tension here, because in 20 years of the development of this metastatic tech industry, we have seen every aspect of our lives become subject to mass surveillance perpetrated by a handful of companies partnering with the US government and other ‘Five Eyes’ agencies to gather more surveillance data about us than has ever been available to any entity in human history.
The criticisms of encrypted communications are as old as the technology: allowing anyone to speak without the state being able to tap into their conversations is a godsend for criminals, terrorists, and pedophiles around the world.
But, Whittaker argues, few of Signal’s loudest critics seem to be consistent in what they care about. “If we really cared about helping children, why are the UK’s schools crumbling? Why was social services funded at only 7% of the amount that was suggested to fully resource the agencies that are on the frontlines of stopping abuse?”
Regrettably, both these arguments could be true. The problem with security is that is an all-or-nothing proposition.
“Signal either works for everyone or it works for no one. Every military in the world uses Signal, every politician I’m aware of uses Signal. Every CEO I know uses Signal because anyone who has anything truly confidential to communicate recognises that storing that on a Meta database or in the clear on some Google server is not good practice.”