Artificial intelligence “is not open in every sense,” the crypto battle is far from won, and Signal’s basic (and uncompromising) approach could complicate interoperability efforts, company president Meredith Whittaker warned. But it’s not all bad news.
(Actually, it’s all bad news, because I wrote the good news separately.)
Talking on stage with me at StrictlyVC LAWhittaker called the resurgence of legislative attacks on encryption “magical thinking.”
“We’re seeing a number of, I would say, local and very politically motivated pieces of legislation that are often geared around the idea of protecting children. And these have been used to push for what is actually a very long-standing desire of security agencies, of authoritarian governments, which is systematic behind-the-scenes strong encryption,” Whittaker said. “Oftentimes, I believe, driven by well-intentioned people who just don’t have the knowledge or the education to understand the consequences of what they’re doing, that could, you know, fundamentally eliminate the ability to communicate privately digitally.”
Ironically, or perhaps cynically, one of the animating factors has been a decade of calls for tech companies to take more responsibility.
“The overarching theme that I see is a deep desire for accountability in technology, which we saw animated in the mid-2010s. So that’s weaponized, and I think we’re seeing surveillance wine in accountability bottles,” he said.
“‘Accountability’ looks like more screens, more oversight, more back doors, more elimination of spaces where people can express themselves or communicate freely, rather than actually scrutinizing the business models that have created, you know, huge platforms whose ways ad tracking can be easily armed for information, or lore, or whatever, right? There is a reluctance to get to the root of the problem. Instead, what we are seeing are essentially proposals to extend surveillance into government and NGO sectors in the name of accountability.”
One such proposal comes through the Investigatory Powers Act in the United Kingdom, under which the Govt threatens to prevent any app updates — globally — that it considers a threat to its national security.
“[The IPA] it’s basically claiming for the UK the ability to require any tech company, in all jurisdictions, to check in with the UK government before you send a security patch because they might be exploiting that patch somewhere for some business he wants to continue doing. It’s a form of, again, parochial, magical thinking here,” Whittaker said.
“It’s very dangerous because we’re threatened with a return to pre-1999 encryption, a kind of early 90s paradigm where the government has a monopoly on encryption and the right to digital privacy. And where the ability to deploy encryption or privacy updates or anything that will secure and harden your service becomes something you have to get permission from the government to do.”
“And frankly,” he added, “I think we need the VC community and the bigger tech companies to be more involved in pointing out what a threat this is to the industry and pushing back.”
Signal President Meredith Whittaker and Devin Coldewey at StrictlyVC LA. Image Credits: TechCrunch
One piece of regulation that might seem logical is the messaging interoperability mandate sought in the EU through the Digital Markets Act. But even this has hidden dangers.
“I think the spirit makes a lot of sense. But of course Signal can’t interoperate with other messaging platforms without them significantly raising their privacy bar,” even ones like WhatsApp that support end-to-end encryption and already partially use the protocol. “Because we don’t just encrypt the contents of messages using the Signal protocol. We encrypt metadata, we encrypt your profile name, your profile picture, who’s in your contact list, who you’re talking to, when you’re talking to them. This should be the level of privacy and security that is generally agreed upon with anyone we work with before we can consent to work together.”
There is a danger, he explained, that the opposite happens, compromising security and privacy in the name of convenience. “It could actually drop the privacy standard, creating a kind of interoperable monolith that further relegates those who require a privacy standard with a lot of integrity to a more marginal position.” (Incidentally, he ridiculed the idea of Apple taking a pass and leaving any such regime hopelessly fragmented.)
In the private sector, Whittaker was quick to call the rising Nvidia a monopoly.
“It’s the chip monopoly — and the CUDA monopoly,” he said, referring to the proprietary computing architecture at the heart of today’s high-performance computing.
I asked if he thought the company had become dangerous in its accumulation of power.
“I mean, we have a lot of Spider-Men pointing at each other, right? I see Microsoft now pointing the finger at Nvidia and saying, if you’re worried about monopoly, don’t look at poor Microsoft, look at Nvidia, they’re the ones, and look at Google too. Google published this kind of PR missions last week, the beginnings of access to artificial intelligence, and they talked about Google being the only vertically integrated company from the app store to the chips. And that’s true, right? But then Google published a couple of days later, that Microsoft is actually the monopoly because they have OpenAI and they kind of have an Azure monopoly, right?
“Well, no one is innocent here. There’s a lot like, “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this…” (ie. famous “hot dog man” meme. removed from “I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson”).
“I think we have to recognize that artificial intelligence depends on big technology. Requires Big Tech resources. It is not open in any sense,” he said. “We can be honest that if you need $100 million for a workout, it’s not an open resource, right? If you need $100 million to scale in a month, that’s not open, right? So we need to be honest about how we use these terms. But I don’t want the detour to Nvidia as the culprit of the week to diminish what we’re dealing with in this massively concentrated power.”
You can watch the entire interview below.
