Notices by Meredith Whittaker (mer__edith@mastodon.world), page 3

All of which is to say, the verdict is in! We don't need more debate, more research into questions answered long ago.

Expert consensus is clear and longstanding, and now it's time to listen to it.

Open letter from UK-affiliated cybersecurity academics laying out why the Online Safety Bill's spy clause is dangerous and unworkable:

https://haddadi.github.io/UKOSBOpenletter.pdf

This is the real, human cost of mass surveillance of everyone's private digital communications.

If we actually care about keeping people safe, we need more end-to-end encryption not less.

Requiring a "skilled person" write a report before mass surveillance is imposed does little

Especially given that the UK gov HAS ALREADY heard from hundreds of skilled experts restating longstanding consensus: there's no such thing as a safe backdoor.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66240006

@aral @Tutanota Let's be clear -- Signal would choose to walk if the choice were between staying and weakening our privacy commitments, or leaving. Until then, we will do everything we can to ensure people have access to Signal and meaningful private communications.

@dalias @aral @Tutanota Because the journalist interviewing me asked a hypothetical: if you had the choice between staying and weakening encryption or walking, which would you choose? And obviously the choice -- in the context of that hypothetical -- is to proverbially walk. This is clear in the body AND abstract of the article, even though they chose a headline w less nuance. OF COURSE we'd set up proxies and etc before "walking". And what "walking" would actually entail is not straightforward.

@dalias @aral @Tutanota Honestly, it's a bit annoying to see an org that allied with ours in terms of values and is also facing down the misguided regulatory landscape overindex so hard on a headline in what appears to be an attempt to set themsleves apart as a more moral/strategic actor. We are clearly all fighting the same fight, and Signal will of course do whatever we can to get people everywhere access to private comms. As we always have.

My brother in JFC...automated AI medical advice (via systems that are almost certainly collecting/creating invasive health surveillance data on behalf of insurers/employers) is still not helpful (even if it were accurate, which it's not) to people who can't afford to follow it

How it started how it's going

OK let’s talk about That Op-ed. The one that insisted not only that privacy is dangerous, but that not affirmatively building surveillance into communication tools is a radical ideological position.

Dunking on the op-ed’s arguments is easy. They’re SHALLOW. And dunk many have, often with the gentleness of a professor grading a draft essay from a student they didn’t want to completely discourage. I’ll direct you to the great threads from others... 1/

https://web.archive.org/web/20230101194846/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/28/opinion/jack-dorseys-twitter-signal-privacy.html

But what’s going on here isn’t substance. And that’s what I want to focus on. Those of us invested in defending privacy need to understand that this op-ed wasn’t written for people with expertise, and its purpose won’t be perturbed by expert rebuttal. We’re not the audience. 2/

The op-ed functions to create the appearance of a “debate” on a more or less settled issue. And this is a powerful function, bolstered by its placement in the NYT. Through this, it can serve as a “Potemkin citation,” providing a seemingly credible reference in support of bad privacy laws and platforms. 3/

What laws? What political platforms? I don’t know. But the age ID requirement passed in CA this week and the regulations that would require communications apps to scan and police content currently moving forward in the EU and the UK give us some clues. 4/

Particularly because these laws would, in effect, prevent people developing tech from NOT building mass surveillance and censorship capabilities. Which, while extremely poorly argued, is effectively the main thrust of the op-ed. 5/

In short, we are right, our arguments are robust, and we have done the reading. But if we want to defend privacy, we’ll need to be coordinated and bold, and not make the mistake of assuming being correct is in itself a strategy. We have a lot of work ahead in 2023! FIN

(This is supposed to be a thread, but I'm going to be new to Mastodon for a long time so, maybe it worked?)