by DOROTHEE BENZ
A recent guest essay in the New York Times (12/28/22) concluded a searing takedown of “our technology overlords” with the sentence:
We have a technologically driven shift of power to ideological individuals and organizations whose lack of appreciation for moral nuance and good governance puts us all at risk.
You might think, Wow, I didn’t think the Times had it in it to take on Google, Meta and Amazon so directly. Well… you’d be right.
Because the technology overlords in this op ed—as absurd as it sounds—are the software engineers supporting the open-source messaging app Signal, and not the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
The piece, “The Signal App and the Danger of Privacy at All Costs,” by Reid Blackman, makes the case for corporate and government surveillance, by demonizing freedom from such surveillance as a dangerous plot by unnamed “technologists” who are “developing and deploying applications of their technologies for explicitly ideological reasons.” Their ideological agenda? Privacy. The horror!
This screed is so full of obvious exaggerations and unsubstantiated claims that it reads like a caricature. That the New York Times published it, even given its ruling-class biases, is surprising as well as disgraceful.
‘Government-evading technology’
“We believe championing user privacy means keeping your data out of anyone’s hands, including our own, rather than ‘responsibly’ managing your data,” Signal’s website says. For Blackman, this commitment to what Signal terms “privacy first” is civil libertarian extremism. He trots out predictable bogeymen demonstrating the dangers of unchecked privacy: terrorists and child predators shielded from law enforcement. “Criminals have also used this government-evading technology,” Blackman says darkly. This fear-mongering rests on an old authoritarian argument: that law-abiding citizens have nothing to hide, and therefore nothing to lose, from government intrusion.
What of the young woman who needs an abortion and needs to make sure her messages are not tracked? What of the undocumented USian who needs to ask a question about their rights without risking being disappeared by ICE? What of the BLM activist planning a protest who wants to avoid police sweeping up and teargassing demonstrators? What of the transgender teenager looking for support who needs to hide their identity from their parents?
They may all be “criminals” to Blackman since all of them are targeted by various state and federal laws, but to those of us who recognize that there is a wide gap between law and justice, they all have a legitimate moral right to privacy.
Moreover, they have a democratic right to privacy.
‘Safe from bad actors’
Blackman is incensed that Signal refrains from collecting metadata on its users. “The company doesn’t know the identity of users, which users are talking to one another or who is in a group message.” This is the real difference between Signal and other popular messaging apps, such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, which also either default to end-to-end encryption or have that option. Why does this matter?
Imagine you are holding a meeting at your house. The conversations in your living room are private—no one can hear them. But the car parked outside can see exactly who goes into your house, when, and when they leave again; how often these gatherings happen; and whenever two people from your group talk to each other. That’s metadata. And once you understand this parallel between the offline and online worlds, you can immediately see why the right to keep that metadata private and away from whoever is parked in that car—whether it’s the NSA, the NYPD, ICE or Google—is essential to democracy.
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting for more