Meredith Whittaker practices what she preaches: As president of the Signal Foundation, she’s a vocal advocate for privacy for all. But she doesn’t just spout empty words.
In 2018, she came to the public’s attention as one of the organizers of the Google walkouts, mobilizing 20,000 employees at the search giant in a dual protest against state-sponsored surveillance and sexual misconduct misconduct.
Whitaker remains passionate about privacy after five years in the public eye, including as a congressional testifier, a university professor, and an adviser to federal agencies.
For example, it’s not uncommon for business leaders to politely respond when asked about salary on the resumes accompanying these interviews. Flat-out refusal to answer questions about age or family is less common. “As a privacy advocate, Whitaker won’t answer personal questions that could lead to guessing passwords or bank authentication ‘secret answers,'” a staffer told me after the interview. “And she encourages others to do the same!”
When she left Google, Whitaker issued a memo to the company announcing her commitment to the ethical adoption of artificial intelligence and to organizing for a “responsible tech industry.” “It’s clear to me that Google is not the place for me to continue doing this work,” she said. That clarity and refusal to compromise sent a signal.
The Signal Foundation was founded in 2017 with $50 million in funding from WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, and its mission is to “protect freedom of expression and enable secure global communications through open source privacy technology.”
The company took over development of messaging app Signal in 2018, and Whitaker took on the newly created role of president in 2022. The timing was just right to start defending Signal, and encryption in general, against a wave of attacks from nation states and corporations around the world.
While laws such as the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) and the EU’s Child Sexual Abuse Regulation contain language that can be used to block or decrypt private communications, Meta’s proposal to introduce end-to-end encryption on Facebook and Instagram drew strong backlash from politicians such as Priti Patel, who, as UK Home Secretary, called the plans “devastating”.
Whitaker said these attacks are not new. Observer “Going back to 1976, [Whitfield] Diffie and [Martin] Hellman was about to publish a paper introducing public key cryptography, a technology that would allow encrypted communication over the Internet, and intelligence agencies were trying to stop him.
“Throughout the ’80s, the N.S.A. [US National Security Agency] So GCHQ lost its monopoly on encryption and by the ’90s it was all governed under military treaties. This was the ‘code wars’. You couldn’t mail code to someone in Europe, it was considered a munitions export.”
But the larger push towards commercializing the internet forced a degree of softening: “It allowed transactions to be encrypted, allowing big companies to choose exactly what to encrypt. At the same time, the Clinton administration endorsed surveillance advertising as a business model, creating incentives to collect data on customers in order to sell it to them.”
Surveillance, she says, has been a “disease” since the dawn of the internet, and encryption poses “a serious threat to the type of power that shapes itself through these information asymmetries.” In other words, she doesn’t see the fight ending anytime soon: “I don’t think these arguments are honest. There are deeper tensions here, because in the 20 years since this metastatic tech industry developed, we’ve seen every aspect of our lives subject to mass surveillance by a small number of companies that, in partnership with the US government and other ‘Five Eyes’ agencies, collect more surveillance data than any organization in the history of humanity has ever had.”
“So if we continue to defend these little pockets of privacy and don’t eventually expand them, and we have to fight back a little bit to get a little bit more space, I think we’re going to have a much darker future than if we defended our position and were able to expand the space for privacy and free communication.”
Criticisms of encrypted communications are as old as the technology itself: allowing everyone to talk without nation states being able to eavesdrop on the conversation is a godsend for criminals, terrorists, and pedophiles around the world.
But Whittaker argues that some of Signal’s strongest critics seem inconsistent about what they care about: “If they are really interested in helping children, why are Britain’s schools collapsing? Why have social services been funded with just 7% of the amount proposed to fully fund agencies on the front line of preventing abuse?”
Sometimes the criticism is unexpected. Signal was recently drawn into the US culture wars after a right-wing campaign to unseat National Public Radio’s new CEO, Katherine Maher, was expanded to include Signal, where Maher serves as a director, after failing. Elon Musk joined in, and the Signal app… He once promoted it In response to claims that the app was “potentially compromised,” the company noted that the app had “known vulnerabilities.”
Whitaker said the allegations are “a weapon in the propaganda war to spread disinformation. We are seeing similar disinformation related to the escalation of the conflict in Ukraine that appears to be designed to move people away from Signal. We believe these campaigns are designed to direct people to less secure alternatives that are more susceptible to hacking and interception.”
The same technology that has drawn criticism for the foundation is also popular among governments and militaries around the world who need to protect their communications from the prying eyes of nation-state hackers and others.
Whittaker sees this as a leveller: Signal is for everyone.
“Signal is either for everyone or it’s for no one. Every military in the world uses Signal, every politician I know uses Signal, every CEO I know uses Signal, because anybody who has to do really sensitive communication knows that storing it in plaintext in a Meta database or on a Google server is not a good practice.”
Whittaker’s vision is singular and not one to be distracted: Despite her interest in AI, she is cautious about combining it with Signal and has been critical of apps like Meta’s WhatsApp that have introduced AI-enabled features.
“I’m really proud that we don’t have an AI strategy. We have to look at ourselves and say, where is the data coming from to train our models, where is the input data coming from? How do we have an AI strategy when our focus is on protecting privacy, not surveilling people?”
Whatever the future holds in terms of technology and political attitudes towards privacy, Whittaker is adamant that the principle is an existential issue.
“We will do the right thing. We would rather go bankrupt to stay in business than undermine or backdoor the privacy guarantees that we promise people.”
resume
Year No Comment.
family No Comment.
education I studied Literature and Rhetoric at Berkeley, then joined Google in 2006 and learned the rest of my education there.
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Source: www.theguardian.com
