10-17-2023 Signal App's Female President Fights Anti-Privacy Efforts Worldwide

🌎On Global Relations
Part of what we’re going to do in [my trip to] India is just learning.

I’m a white lady. I’m based in the U.S. I don’t have an instinct for the nuances and realpolitik of India, which itself is heterogeneous. We’re going there to learn.

🔎 On Breaking Signal’s Encryption by Scanning Messages
The government acknowledged that there’s no technology that can magically scan everyone’s communications in a private and secure way. There are a number of interested vendors that have been, in one way or another, claiming the technology exists. It doesn’t exist in any safe form. There’s no way to square that circle.

⏩ On the Beginning of Her Tenure at Signal
I joined in September of last year. One of the first things I did was convene a meeting in Berlin of a bunch of the old heads of the digital rights and policy space to be like, let’s map what’s happening. What’s the fight like? Who are our allies, what are the pretexts they’re using?

📳 On Competing App Telegram
The pattern you see is of Telegram making a bunch of noise and then quietly cooperating with governments. This means that people are, I would say, tricked into trusting Telegram as a safe app for communications in high-stakes environments like Hong Kong. There’s literally life-or-death consequences, or at least existential consequences. You can get disappeared.

😡 On Facebook
On the infrastructural disadvantage, that’s true, but we also have the advantage of … we don’t have to be full of [expletive].

We’re not actually a surveillance company. I’m not trying to pretend Facebook is good. I don’t have to toe a party line that is divorced from reality. And we aren’t Big Tech.