I had to stop reading halfway through to respond.
> In comparison, tech sisters advocating for an absolute right to privacy seem to be a very rare, and maybe mythical, species.
Ever heard of Meredith Whittaker?
> We could have designed our protocols to be minimally compatible with “a nation of laws,” but the tech bros insisted that compromise was treason, and, as a result, we will lose more privacy than necessary.
This has to be a joke. There's private, and there's not private. There is nothing in between. This is not about tech bros. This is about guiding principles, about personal liberty, and about freedom from tyranny.
> It may not quite be a law of nature, but my personal guess is that the opportunities for anonymity on the Internet will shrink until mothers no longer are forced to have “the talk” when their daughters get their first mobile phone.
In addition to "the talk" guess what else they won't be forced (or allowed) to talk about? Political dissent.
This chunk of the article is both sexist and defeatist. Now to read the rest.
> This is about guiding principles, about personal liberty, and about freedom from tyranny.
The point he’s trying to make, as I understand it, is that states adapt. They don’t just throw up their hands and say “guess we can’t do anything about that encrypted traffic.”
The response to distributed kinetic kill capability in the US, for example, is for police to become more militarized and treat every encounter as a potentially lethal one.
> There's private, and there's not private. There is nothing in between
It’s not an argument about privacy per se, it’s highlighting that the stronger the protections against state surveillance and intervention, the stronger the state becomes. By taking an absolutionist stance, we push our institutions to towards the same in response.
I’m not making an argument or against encryption or privacy, just pointing out the systemic effects.
Expecting that governments won't respond to software which is tailored to prevent them from investigating crimes (e.g. Signal's primary marketing is all about preventing government access to chats) was so utterly naive that only privileged techbros could make it up.
Other people understand that picking a fight with someone will result in a fight.
How did the police in XIX and XX century even managed to investigate the crimes without having access to the records of criminals' communications, and with way worse forensics available? No, seriously, how?
One of the things they did is they investigated metadata: you know, witnesses who saw what people walked around? Today we have way more of such data, readily available for them, plus ubiquitous CCTV and the like. That's not enough, apparently? Also, the police used to employ informants among the criminals themselves, and even implant the cover agents. Apparently, this nowadays is too expensive/bothersome, compared to running a global search for the keywords in the text messages and the transcripts of all voice messages sent in the country during the last month.
Phone wiretaps, conversation wire taps and access to letters have been normal since those communication technologies existed.
So what the heck are you on about? Content of conversations, letters and phone calls was critical to many investigations - including famous ones like WaterGate and bringing down Al Capone.
Again, if you decide to attack the government's ability to do their work, expect a pushback. This isn't hard.
I finished the article. My own bad prediction: If FOSS "dies" it will continue to thrive in 3rd world countries, where no one bothers to administer punishment for the heinous crime of not letting your government's LLM read every word you type. The 1st world will ignore all this until it becomes apparent that the (former) 3rd world countries are suddenly in a position to economically surpass everyone else, and at that point the wise will see that their desire to keep a stranglehold on online activity was actually a bad idea that allowed their dominance to wane and wither.
> Ever heard of Meredith Whittaker?
The fact that you name one makes her very rare indeed.
- Cindy Cohn, Executive Director of the EFF
- Eva Galperin, Director of Cybersecurity at the EFF
- Runa Sandvik, formerly of Tor Project
- Yan Zhu, EFF Fellow and CISO at Brave
And many, many more.
It rankled me more than a bit that the author apparently looked around his bubble in Denmark and the FOSS community, saw no "tech sister" privacy advocates, and decided to paint with the widest brush possible and assume there are none anywhere.
Like half this list + Meredith are lawyers/policy people. Add in computer security specialists/operators. They use software as a tool to achieve political ends.
"tech bros" in context of the article is pretty much referring to builders of software. The tech sisters who have built significant projects are indeed mythically rare.
Names like Radia Perlman might be a better choice.
> In comparison, tech sisters advocating for an absolute right to privacy seem to be a very rare, and maybe mythical, species.
Care to amend your statement? I don't see any qualification about building software there.
Face it, the author was just searching for another reason to be mad at men in the software realm.
If you refresh yourself on the thread originator comment, you will notice we are talking about "tech sisters advocating for an absolute right to privacy", not "tech sisters who have built significant technical projects". I think Dr. Perlman fits in the latter, not the former category.
Also, I think the intended meaning of "tech bros" in the article is more nuanced. Charitably: naive, sophomorically idealistic SV tech entrepreneurs who rode the "information wants to be free" wave to a world where WhatsApp & FB Messenger are E2EE by default. Uncharitably: anyone not in author's idealogical tribe, particularly ideologically impure programmers who have turned to entrepreneurism. And Americans.
Good to know you don't think Yan or Runa's technical work is significant, though.
He already previously qualified tech bros as people who literally built technology and a whole industry in the US that the EU did not build.
The advocating for privacy is the cherry on top. And I never said their work was insignificant. It’s just not foundational — not something I’ve built my own career on the back of — and the primary association that you would have with any of them is going to be advocacy.
Radia is also absolutely a privacy advocate and literally wrote the book (as usual) on the intersection between Network Security and Privacy…
Maybe she would been better served spending all her time building a Twitter following and working on press releases.
I mean I can point to a half dozen that I know personally but they’re not famous shrug. This seems like a weird argument to make to me, and besides the overall point the author was attempting to make anyway