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After Backlash From Its Dumb Password Sharing Crackdown, Netflix Lowers Prices In 100 Countries (Just Not In The U.S.)
from the play-stupid-games-win-stupid-prizes dept
So we’ve noted more than a few times that Netflix’s password sharing crackdown is a dumb cash grab. The company had already raised prices, it had already monetized the thing it was worried about (it already charges you extra if you want more simultaneous streams), and its hard 180 from encouraging password sharing to demonizing it turned off users just as streaming competition heated up.
Not too surprisingly, customers haven’t responded well to being nickel-and-dimed by a company whose service quality has taken a bit of a dive, and have threatened to unsubscribe en masse. I’ve not yet seen evidence they actually are yet, but Netflix is clearly worried that they’re about to.
The company announced late last week it would be dropping prices in over 100 countries as it tries to fend off streaming competitors:
Netflix, facing more competition globally in the streaming wars, has cut pricing in more than 100 markets worldwide — in some cases, chopping the price of monthly plans in half — to boost subscriber acquisition and retention.
Netflix first tested its dumb password sharing crackdown in many of these markets to disastrous effect. The idea wasn’t implemented particularly well, leaving many customers confused. Netflix itself admits that these confused and annoyed customers are likely keen on jumping over to streaming companies that won’t punish them for a practice the industry itself spent a decade actively encouraging.
Netflix’s estimates on how much money this password sharing crackdown will make them don’t appear based in reality. As Netflix has gotten larger and more powerful, you can see it behaving more and more like the MPA, Comcast, and other data cherry-picking industry giants, a stark contrast from its origins as a company that fought on the right side of issues like net neutrality.
That said, I still think most Netflix users will tend to stick around for now, given most consumers are lazy, and the value proposition of a service like Netflix remains better (for now) than traditional, bloated and costly cable TV bundles.
Still, the company’s stark personality shift, from disruptive innovator that actually cared about healthy markets, to another nickel-and-diming cable TV provider, is notable and not going anywhere soon. There will be more dumb decisions to come as Netflix fixates exclusively on feeding Wall Street’s insatiable desire for improved quarterly returns at any cost; a one-time innovator doomed to be disrupted.
Filed Under: cable tv, competition, disruption, netflix, password sharing, streaming, video
Companies: netflix
Slim Shady Files Shady Trademark Opposition Over Application For ‘Reasonably Shady’ Podcast
from the we're-gonna-have-a-problem-here dept
And if that title didn’t really confuse you all that much, then you’ve managed to get the point. Eminem hasn’t been shy about asserting his intellectual property rights in the past, though much of his efforts on that front have actually been to the benefit of artists from his fights with record labels. That doesn’t mean that Em’s team isn’t capable of some IP missteps, however.
And we appear to have an example of such a misstep. See, Eminem’s legal team has filed an opposition to a trademark application for a podcast hosted by 2 reality show participants titled “Reasonably Shady.”
Rapper Marshall “Eminem” Mathers is on a legal mission to prove he’s the real Shady after “Real Housewives of Potomac” stars Dixon and Bryant attempted to trademark “Reasonably Shady” – the title of their hit podcast – last year.
A lawyer for Dixon and Bryant told The Times on Tuesday that the reality-TV duo intend “to defend their trademark application” despite the “Real Slim Shady” artist’s motion to block it.
Let’s not mince words: this is stupid. Let’s also be clear and fair to Eminem: the trademark application seeks approval not just for the podcast, but also for your typical merch categories. These include clothing, drink containers, accessories, makeup, etc. And I don’t even need to go look to verify that Eminem has all kinds of trademarks for all his various monikers for many, if not all, of those categories.
But it’s still stupid. The inclusion of the word “shady” does not in and of itself mean that there is real or potential public confusion over the source of any goods. Slim doesn’t own every iteration of the word “shady” when it comes to trademarks in those categories. And “Reasonably Shady” is a pretty good deviation from “Slim Shady” or “Shady” for a variety of reasons. If nothing else, Em is using the term as a noun, as in his nom de guerre, whereas the lovely Housewives ladies are using it as an adjective. Beyond that, the details of the branding matter and I don’t seen anything that would lead me to think that the general public is automatically going to assume that Eminem is involved simply because the word “shady” appears.
In Tuesday’s filing, Team Mathers points out that Eminem has long used the marks Shady, Slim Shady and Shady Limited to peddle merchandise such as T-shirts and baseball caps.
“The marks SLIM SHADY, SHADY and SHADY LIMITED have become unique and are identified by the general public solely with [Mathers] and his goods and services,” the filing states.
That sure will be news to all the other folks using the word “shady” as registered trademarks in these categories. Just to pick out one example, here is the live trademark for “Shady Days Hats.” Why is that one less offensive than “Reasonably Shady”? Who the hell knows!
But what I do know is that this is all very silly. Eminem is an immensely talented artist and businessman. That’s where his efforts should be focused, rather than trying to tell some “real” housewives what they can put on a coffee mug.
Filed Under: eminem, likelihood of confusion, real housewives, reasonably shady, slim shady, trademark
Yet Another Former Israeli Intelligence Officer Linked To Yet Another Shady Company Offering Hacking Tools
I’m not sure what’s happening inside Israel’s intelligence services, but it’s not sending the world its best when it’s done with them.
For months, we’ve been covering tons of negative news generated by tech companies started up by former Israeli government employees. Most of this has been focused on NSO Group, a malware merchant with tons of malicious customers whose phone-targeting, amped-up stalkerware has been linked to misuse by human rights violators around the world. It has also been linked to misuse by countries that generally try to keep their human rights violations in check.
The same can be said for Candiru, another Israeli startup featuring former government operatives. Like NSO Group, Candiru’s inability to be more selective about who it sells to has netted it sanctions from the US government.
Then there’s Cytrox, another spyware company formed by former Israeli intelligence agencies. This company is at the center of a domestic surveillance debacle in Greece, one that has led to the resignation of the head of the country’s intelligence service.
While it’s true these companies can’t necessarily control the use of the products and services they sell, it seems like more than a coincidence that all of these companies were founded by former intelligence operatives. This suggests there’s something a bit off about the intelligence mindset in Israel. Operatives tasked with defending a nation that’s always in a state of conflict are rolling back into the private sector with plenty of ideas but little in the way of morals and ethics.
It cannot be a coincidence that customers routinely abuse the powerful products these obviously very intelligent people create. Some of that can be chalked up to the normal government desire to abuse power. But I would think some of this has to be traced back to the sales pitches and customer cultivation tactics deployed by these companies — something that perhaps pushes government customers into exploring some extremely gray areas in the surveillance arena.
These companies may have some form of plausible deniability since it’s their customers doing the actual abusing. The same can’t be said from another Israeli tech firm founded by a former Israeli special forces officer — one recently exposed by The Guardian in a blockbuster article that details the company’s CIA-esque kingmaking efforts.
A team of Israeli contractors who claim to have manipulated more than 30 elections around the world using hacking, sabotage and automated disinformation on social media has been exposed in a new investigation.
The unit is run by Tal Hanan, a 50-year-old former Israeli special forces operative who now works privately using the pseudonym “Jorge”, and appears to have been working under the radar in elections in various countries for more than two decades.
“Team Jorge.” The banal name belies the destructive nature of the private firm’s offerings and tactics. There’s no plausible deniability here. Sure, the unnamed company sells services to end users, but it performs the dirty work itself. According to the joint investigation involving 30 news outlets worldwide and coordinated by French nonprofit Forbidden Stories, “Team Jorge” controls thousands of fake social media profiles across several services to bury negative news, spread misinformation, and otherwise serve the needs of its questionable customers who are located all over the world. The “team” has apparently done work in Africa, Central and South America, Europe, and even the United States.
Undercover work has exposed even more about the company, including a pretty fucking unsavory sales pitch.
In more than six hours of secretly recorded meetings, Hanan and his team spoke of how they could gather intelligence on rivals, including by using hacking techniques to access Gmail and Telegram accounts. They boasted of planting material in legitimate news outlets, which are then amplified by the Aims bot-management software.
Much of their strategy appeared to revolve around disrupting or sabotaging rival campaigns: the team even claimed to have sent a sex toy delivered via Amazon to the home of a politician, with the aim of giving his wife the false impression he was having an affair.
It’s not just disinformation campaigns and election meddling. It’s also things that aren’t all that far away from extortion and blackmail. And what the firm offers appears to work, at least according to “Team Jorge’s” founder, Tal Hanan. While it’s pretty sad a company so well-versed in subterfuge was unable to sniff out the interlopers and their recording devices, it does at least provide us with the sort of frank admissions no one will ever get on the record.
In his initial pitch to the potential clients, Hanan claimed: “We are now involved in one election in Africa … We have a team in Greece and a team in [the] Emirates … You follow the leads. [We have completed] 33 presidential-level campaigns, 27 of which were successful.” Later, he said he was involved in two “major projects” in the US but claimed not to engage directly in US politics.
Also demonstrated for the undercover journalists: Hanan’s semi-automatic bogus account creation tool which generates fake accounts with years of backstory almost instantly. Hanan also allowed the reporters to watch as he manipulated a hacked Gmail account and showed how easy it was to manipulate Telegram accounts by leveraging known SS7 vulnerabilities.
Despite all these admissions of highly questionable behavior, Hanan continues to deny any wrongdoing. But meddling in foreign elections is always wrong, as is providing cover-up services for entities that feel there’s something that needs to be covered up.
And, again, we’re back looking at Israel and its existence as the current epicenter of souped-up surveillance and hacking tools that have been crafted by former government employees — employees who now seem far too willing to use their powers for evil… or at least sell them to someone willing to use them for evil. Israel’s government has a problem. But the problem with that problem is none of this involves current employees, which means its response will likely be too limited to actually deter future employees from heading into the private sector to partner with havoc-wreakers around the world. It’s time for the Israel’s intelligence services to take a long look at their internal culture because there’s some sort of rot in desperate need of being rooted out.
Filed Under: israel, malware, spyware, surveillance, tal hanan
Companies: candiru, cytrox, nso group
FCC ‘Investigating’ Repeated Broadband Industry Coverage Lies
from the same-old-same-old dept
After years of criticism about their inaccuracy, the FCC recently spent another $50 million (on top of the $350 million they’d already spent) on supposedly better broadband maps. But the end result is still a bit of a mess, with entrenched telecom monopolies like Comcast being repeatedly caught claiming to deliver broadband in areas that can’t receive service. Often to glean subsidies the company doesn’t deserve.
And while the FCC has implemented a “challenge process” for those trying to correct the maps, numerous municipal leaders and telecom lawyers tell me that process has been a bit of a hot mess. That’s a problem, as folks line up to grab their share of more than $50 billion in new broadband subsidies made possible by Covid relief and the infrastructure bill.
Not too surprisingly, Comcast is hoovering up the lion’s share of new funding. And not too surprisingly, Comcast keeps getting caught lying about its own broadband coverage. ISPs have spent decades fighting against better maps, knowing full well that if data more concretely shows market failure and a lack of competition, regulators might get the crazy idea to actually do something about it.
The FCC says it’s investigating, for whatever that winds up being worth:
In response to questions about the FCC’s coverage map inaccuracies from members of Congress, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a Feb. 3 letter that “we have taken several steps to prevent systematic overreporting of coverage by broadband service providers.”
“In fact, we already have an investigation underway,” Rosenworcel wrote.
That said, Rosenworcel doesn’t have much of a reputation for making waves with major telecom giants. And keep in mind Comcast is one of several companies waging a sleazy smear campaign against FCC nominee Gigi Sohn to scuttle her nomination, ensuring that the agency lacks the voting majority to do anything deemed remotely controversial by industry. Including holding industry accountable.
Having covered this sector for longer than I’d like, I absolutely guarantee that while this funding is going to be a huge help in some areas (especially for municipalities, cooperatives and city-owned utilities), you’re going to see an unprecedented torrent of fraud complaints as the infrastructure money starts to flow. And without a reformer like Sohn pushing them to action, I suspect the FCC won’t have the kind of backbone required to hold anybody meaningfully accountable. Rinse, wash, repeat.
Filed Under: broadband, broadband maps, digital divide, fcc, gigi sohn, high speed internet, infrastructure bills, subsidies, telecom
What Transparency? Twitter Seems To Have Forgotten About Transparency Reporting
from the that-ain't-transparent dept
One of the key things that Elon Musk promised in taking over Twitter was about how he was going to be way more transparent. He’s mentioned it many times, specifically noting that transparency is how he would build “trust” in the company.
So, anyway, about that… over a decade ago, the big internet companies set the standard for companies publishing regular transparency reports. Twitter has released one every six months for years. And since Musk’s takeover, I’ve wondered if that would continue.
Twitter’s last transparency report — published in July 2022 and covering the last six months of 2021 — found that the U.S. government made more requests for account data than any other government, accounting for over 24 percent of Twitter’s global requests. The FBI, Department of Justice, and Secret Service “consistently submitted the greatest percentage of requests for the six previous reporting periods.” Requests from the U.S. government were down seven percent from the last reporting period but Twitter’s compliance rate went up 13 percent in the latter half of 2021.
Normally, Twitter would have published the transparency data for the first half of 2022 in January of 2023. Yet, here we are.
“Elon talked a lot about the power of transparency. But the way Elon and his enablers interpret transparency is a rather creative use of the word. It’s not meaningful transparency in the way the industry defines it,” one former Twitter employee familiar with the reports tells Rolling Stone.
[….]
“We were working on the transparency reports, then all the program leads were immediately fired, and the remaining people that could’ve worked on the reports all left subsequently,” one former staffer says. “I’m not aware of any people left [at Twitter] who could produce these transparency reports.”
The former Twitter staffer adds, “It’s really a problem that there’s no transparency data from 2022 anywhere.”
Speaking to former Twitter employees, I had two of them confirm that Twitter actually had the transparency report more or less ready to go before Musk took over (remember, the January release would cover the first half of 2022 so they had time to work on it). But apparently, it’s either been lost or forgotten.
And, of course, this is a real shame, as Twitter had been seen as one of the companies that used transparency reports in more powerful ways than other companies. It was widely recognized as setting the bar quite high.
“Twitter had some of the best transparency reporting of any platform,” says Jan Rydzak, company and investor engagement manager at Ranking Digital Rights, a program hosted by the Washington, D.C., think tank New America that grades tech and telecom firms on the human-rights goals they set.
“Transparency reporting has been an important tool for companies to demonstrate to their users how they protect their privacy and how they push back against improper government requests for their data,” adds Isedua Oribhabor, business and human rights lead at Access Now, whose 2021 Transparency Reporting Index commended Twitter for nine straight years of reporting.
As we’ve discussed before, while all the other larger internet companies caved to DOJ demands regarding limits on how they report US law enforcement demands for information, Twitter actually fought back and sued the US government for the right to post that information. And while it unfortunately lost in the end (years later), that’s the kind of thing that shows a commitment to transparency which helps build trust.
In place of that, Musk’s “transparency” seems to be to cherry pick information, hand it to people who don’t understand it, but who will push misleading nonsense for clicks. That doesn’t build trust. It builds up a cult of ignorant fools.
Filed Under: elon musk, transparency, transparency reports, trust
Companies: twitter
Supreme Court Denies Cert To NSA Case, Allows State Secret Privilege To Roll On Unaltered
from the press-F-to-escape-lawsuit dept
While we’re waiting to see if the Trump-stocked Supreme Court is going to end the internet as we know it, the nation’s top court has been rejecting, without comment, other essential cases that really could have used another set of judicial eyes.
On Wednesday, we covered one of the Supreme Court’s passes — this one involving parody, police, and qualified immunity. The Sixth Circuit granted immunity to Parma, Ohio police officers who raided a local man’s house, seized a bunch of electronics, and arrested him for the supposed crime of “disrupting police service” — all because he had created a parody Parma PD Facebook page that announced local cops were driving around in a van offering abortions and hosting “Pedophile Reform” events.
Most people saw it for what it was: not particularly subtle satire. The officers, however, weren’t laughing, so they decided to violate the page creator’s First Amendment rights. The Appeals Court took two swings at this one, the first one denying immunity because of the obvious First Amendment violations. For some reason during the second review, the judges reversed course and decided there was just enough probable cause to allow the officers to walk away from the suit. The Supreme Court, by denying certification, said basically the same thing: it’s ok for cops to engage in obvious First Amendment violations as long as there’s some law laying around that might very tenuously support an arrest warrant.
The same order list [PDF] contains another rejection by the Supreme Court that’s only going to encourage more dubious government behavior. In the list of things the Supreme Court can’t be bothered to review is the long-running Wikimedia v. NSA lawsuit — one prompted by the Snowden leaks that sought to hold the government accountable for warrantless domestic surveillance. (h/t Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica)
“Certori denied” is all the order says. With those two words, the federal government is allowed to continue chanting “state secrets” any time it wishes to exit a lawsuit over its surveillance activities. Despite Wikimedia offering up one of the NSA’s own documents — one that appeared to show the online, crowd-sourced encyclopedia was one of the agency’s many, many targets — the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court decided the NSA’s national security work was too important to allow further examination, much less a ruling in favor of the surveilled.
That terminates a lawsuit that was imitated nearly eight years ago. The denial makes it far less likely any current or future lawsuits over bulk domestic surveillance will survive judicial review because there is currently no circuit in the country willing to wholly reject the government’s state secrets privilege, even when evidence appears to show the government has engaged in illegal surveillance. What could have been a chance to limit the invocation of government secrecy to dodge litigation has been discarded without comment by this Supreme Court. That means the government wins without having to show its cards, even after the plaintiffs ante’d up on every litigation round.
Given the amount of time and money it takes to challenge the federal government in court, this rejection is going to deter victims of unlawful surveillance from taking their case to court. And that works out just fine for the Executive Branch, which historically hasn’t seen much in the way of checks and balances from an entity explicitly created to do exactly that.
Filed Under: about collection, ed snowden, mass surveillance, nsa, section 702, supreme court, surveillance, upstream, upstream collection
Companies: aclu, wikimedia
Daily Deal: Scrivener 3, The Go-To App for Writers
from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept
Scrivener is the go-to app for writers of all kinds, used every day by best-selling novelists, screenwriters, non-fiction writers, students, academics, lawyers, journalists, translators, and more. Scrivener won’t tell you how to write—it simply provides everything you need to start writing and keep writing. Scrivener makes it easy to structure ideas, write a first draft, and give structure to your finished work. If you’re a scriptwriter, journalist, or creative writer who wants to write your next great book, this is the best writing tool for you. It’s on sale for $30.
Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.
Filed Under: daily deal
Getting Kicked Off Social Media For Breaking Its Rules Is Nothing Like Being Sent To A Prison Camp For Retweeting Criticism Of A Dictator
from the push-back,-don't-emulate dept
It’s become frustrating how often people insist that losing this or that social media account is “censorship” and an “attack on free speech.” Not only is it not that, it makes a mockery of those who face real censorship and real attacks on free speech. The Washington Post recently put out an amazing feature about people who have been jailed or sent away to re-education camps for simply reposting something on social media. It’s titled “They clicked once. Then came the dark prisons.“
The authoritarian rulers were not idle. They planned to take back the public square, and now they are doing it. According to Freedom on the Net 2022, published by Freedom House, between June 2021 and May 2022, authorities in 40 countries blocked social, political or religious content online, an all-time high. Social media has made people feel as though they can speak openly, but technological tools also allow autocrats to target individuals. Social media users leave traces: words, locations, contacts, network links. Protesters are betrayed by the phones in their pockets. Regimes criminalized free speech and expression on social media, prohibiting “insulting the president” (Belarus), “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” (China), “discrediting the military” (Russia) or “public disorder” (Cuba).
Ms. Perednya’s case is chilling. She was an honors student at Belarus’s Mogilev State University. Three days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she reposted, in a chat on Telegram, another person’s harsh criticism of Mr. Putin and Mr. Lukashenko, calling for street protests and saying Belarus’s army should not enter the conflict.
She was arrested the next day while getting off a bus to attend classes. Judges have twice upheld her 6½-year sentence on charges of “causing damage to the national interests of Belarus” and “insulting the president.”
That is chilling free speech. That is censorship. You losing your account for harassing someone is not.
There are a bunch of stories in the piece, each more harrowing then the next.
After a wave of protest against covid-19 restrictions in late November, Doa, a 28-year-old tech worker in Beijing, told The Post that she and a friend were at a night demonstration briefly, keeping away from police and people filming with their phones. “I worked before in the social media industry. … I know how those things can be used by police,” she said. “They still found me. I’m still wondering how that is possible.” She added: “All I can think of is that they knew my phone’s location.” Two days later, police called her mother, claiming Doa had participated in “illegal riots” and would soon be detained. “I don’t know why they did it that way. I think it creates fear,” Doa said. A few hours later, the police called her directly, and she was summoned to a police station in northern Beijing, where her phone was confiscated and she underwent a series of interrogations over roughly nine hours. The group Chinese Human Rights Defenders estimates that more than 100 people have been detained for the November protests.
The piece calls on democratic nations to do something about all of this.
But as authoritarian regimes evolve and adapt to such measures, protesters will require new methods and tools to help them keep their causes alive — before the prison door clangs shut. It is a job not only for democratic governments, but for citizens, universities, nongovernmental organizations, civic groups and, especially, technology companies to figure out how to help in places such as Belarus and Hong Kong, where a powerful state has thrown hundreds of demonstrators into prison without a second thought, or to find new ways to keep protest alive in surveillance-heavy dystopias such as China.
Free nations should also use whatever diplomatic leverage they have. When the United States and other democracies have contact with these regimes, they should raise political prisoners’ cases, making the autocrats squirm by giving them lists and names — and imposing penalties. The Global Magnitsky Act offers a mechanism for singling out the perpetrators, going beyond broad sanctions on countries and aiming visa bans and asset freezes at individuals who control the systems that seize so many innocent prisoners. The dictators should hear, loud and clear, that brutish behavior will not be excused or ignored.
Except, what the piece leaves out is that, rather than do any of that, it seems that the political class in many of these “free nations” are looking on in envy. We’ve pointed out how various nations, such as the UK with its Online Safety Bill, and the US with a wide variety of bills, are actually taking pages directly from these authoritarian regimes, claiming that there can be new laws that require censorship in the name of “public health” or “to protect the children.” From pretty much all political parties, we’re seeing an embrace of using the power of regulations to make citizens less free to use the internet.
The many, many stories in the WaPo feature are worth thinking about, but the suggestion that the US government or other governments in so-called “free” nations aren’t moving in the same direction is naïve. We keep hearing talk about the need to “verify” everyone online, or to end anonymity. But that’s exactly what these authoritarian countries are doing to track and identify those saying what they don’t like.
And then we see the UK trying to require sites take down “legal, but harmful” content, or US Senators proposing bills that would make social media companies liable for anything the government declares to be “medical misinfo” and you realize how we’re putting in place the identical infrastructure, enabling a future leader to treat the citizens of these supposedly “free” nations identically to what’s happening in the places called out in the WaPo piece.
If anything, reading that piece should make it clear that these supposedly free nations should be pushing back against those types of laws, highlighting how similar laws are being abused to silence dissent. Fight for those locked up in other countries, but don’t hand those dictators and authoritarians the ammunition to point right back at our own laws, allowing them to claim they’re just doing the same things we are.
Filed Under: authoritarian, censorship, dictators, free expression, free speech, internet
Signal: If UK Government Undermines Encryption It Can Kiss Messaging Service Used By Its Employees Goodbye
from the better-start-writing-up-the-carve-outs dept
If anyone can call a government’s bluff, it’s Signal. It’s a nonprofit, which means it doesn’t need to make a bunch of shareholders happy by capitulating to ridiculous government demands in order to retain market share.
Governments really can’t threaten Signal. It doesn’t collect or retain user information, so it can’t hand this data over no matter how much or how hard government agencies demand it.
When governments start threatening to undermine or criminalize encryption, the encrypted messaging service is more than willing to walk away from those markets, rather than weaken/remove encryption just so it can keep serving users in these countries. While that doesn’t do much good for Signal users in countries where encryption is being eyed for vivisection, it does protect the rest of its users everywhere else in the world. Once encryption is undermined — no matter where it takes place — it threatens the security and privacy of every user.
The government of India has been steadily increasing its direct control of the internet, including social media and messaging services. To achieve this control, the Indian government needs to backdoor or ban encryption. In response to this threat, Signal has promised to exit the market, rather than produce a weaker (or unencrypted) version of its service for the Indian market, which is one of the world’s largest.
The UK government is now receiving the same declaration from Signal the Indian government did when it started directly threatening encryption. The UK government has been trying to undermine encryption for years, with each passing year bringing with it new proposals and new levels of desperation from legislators.
Whatever the UK government decides to do, Signal isn’t interested in collaborating with it if it says encryption has to go.
Asked if the Online Safety Bill could jeopardise their ability to offer a service in the UK, [Signal president Meredith Whittaker] told the BBC: “It could, and we would absolutely 100% walk rather than ever undermine the trust that people place in us to provide a truly private means of communication.
“We have never weakened our privacy promises, and we never would.”
The UK government, however, continues to live in denial. It claims its proposed changes to the Online Safety Bill would not “ban end-to-end encryption.” That may be so but the proposal is intended to weaken end-to-end encryption by either compelling encryption-breaking by providers or creating backdoors for law enforcement access. As usual, the government claims this is for the children.
“The Online Safety Bill does not represent a ban on end-to-end encryption but makes clear that technological changes should not be implemented in a way that diminishes public safety – especially the safety of children online.
“It is not a choice between privacy or child safety – we can and we must have both.”
Except that it is. And the choice isn’t about privacy, it’s about security. You can either have a secure system or you can have this fairy tale lots of government officials believe: something that allows cops in but keeps bad guys out.
[Whittaker] added: “Encryption is either protecting everyone or it is broken for everyone.”
She said the Online Safety Bill “embodied” a variant of this magical thinking.
And the government knows this. Last year, its own Information Commissioner’s Office issued its own report on the government’s encryption war, coming down firmly on side of strong, uncompromised encryption… for the children.
“E2EE [end-to-end encryption] serves an important role both in safeguarding our privacy and online safety,” said Stephen Bonner, the ICO’s executive director for innovation and technology. “It strengthens children’s online safety by not allowing criminals and abusers to send them harmful content or access their pictures or location.”
If you want to protect children, the last thing you should do is weaken the encryption that protects their connections and communications. That’s the point the ICO made. But the other parts of the government seem to think they know best and are ignoring this advice to press forward with efforts intended to weaken or backdoor encryption.
If the UK government won’t listen to the UK government, maybe it will listen to the UK government? Plenty of its employees like to use encrypted services featuring self-destructing messages (including Signal), presumably to keep their communications out of the hands of public records requesters. Will these legislators and officials be willing to work against their own interests by chasing Signal out of the country with anti-encryption mandates? Or will they decide to safeguard their own interests (and the some of the public’s interests too, albeit inadvertently) by shutting down these proposals before the become law?
Filed Under: encryption, online safety bill, uk
Companies: signal
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