Signal president Meredith Whittaker is prepared to withdraw the privacy-focused messaging app from Australia — saying she hopes it doesn’t become a “gangrenous foot” by poisoning its entire platform by forcing it to hand over its users’ encrypted data to authorities.

Ms Whittaker says Signal would take the “drastic step” of leaving any market where a government compelled it to create a “backdoor” to access its data, saying it would create a vulnerability that hackers and authoritative regimes could exploit, undermining Signals’ “reason for existing”.

Pressure has been mounting on Signal and other secure messaging platforms. ASIO director general Mike Burgess has urged tech companies to unlock encrypted messages to assist terrorism and national security investigations, saying offshore extremists use such platforms to communicate.

archive.today

  • MHLoppy@fedia.io
    5·
    3 days ago

    Haha, that was Turnbull? It really sounds more like an Abbott thing to have said!

      • MHLoppy@fedia.io
        5·
        3 days ago

        This is now becoming incredibly tangential to the original post, but the comment thread reminded me of the time the hacker known as “Alex” uncovered Tony Abbott’s passport and phone numbers, who reacted pretty well to it: https://mango.pdf.zone/finding-former-australian-prime-minister-tony-abbotts-passport-number-on-instagram/

        And then Tony Abbott just… calls me on the phone?

        Mostly, he wanted to check whether his understanding of how I’d found his passport number was correct (it was). He also wanted to ask me how to learn about “the IT”.

        He asked some intelligent questions, like “how much information is in a boarding pass, and what do people like me need to know to be safe?”, and “why can you get a passport number from a boarding pass, but not from a bus ticket?”.

        The answer is that boarding passes have your password printed on them, and bus tickets don’t. You can use that password to log in to a website (widely regarded as a bad move), and at that point all bets are off, websites can just do whatever they want.

        He was vulnerable, too, about how computers are harder for him to understand.

        “It’s a funny old world, today I tried to log in to a [Microsoft] Teams meeting (Teams is one of those apps), and the fire brigade uses a Teams meeting. Anyway I got fairly bamboozled, and I can now log in to a Teams meeting in a way I couldn’t before.

        It’s, I suppose, a terrible confession of how people my age feel about this stuff.”

        Then the Earth stopped spinning on its axis.

        For an instant, time stood still.

        Then he said it:

        “You could drop me in the bush and I’d feel perfectly confident navigating my way out, looking at the sun and direction of rivers and figuring out where to go, but this! Hah!”

        This was possibly the most pure and powerful Australian energy a human can possess, and explains how we elected our strongest as our leader. The raw energy did in fact travel through the phone speaker and directly into my brain, killing me instantly.

        When I’d collected myself from various corners of the room, he asked if there was a book about the basics of IT, since he wanted to learn about it. That was kinda humanising, since it made me realise that even famous people are just people too.