In short: since the EU is trying to introduce legislation to monitor private communication, the author states that it's a moral duty of everyone to start encrypting their communications (instant messaging in particular), as a form of civil disobedience. It works when many (preferably most) people disobey.
Unfortunately this doesn't work because a _lot_ of will people legitimately will tell you they "have nothing to hide" and would tell you they'd let 3-letter agencies in the U.S. go through their phone with a fine-tooth comb (at least, until they're actually being faced with that reality and try to get out of it).
The only reason we currently have any message encryption is because a few tech companies have made the decision to protect as many as possible by releasing products which enable it (iOS, Whatsapp, and now texts via Google Messages). Not everyone who uses these products knows they're protected and not everyone will care if they were to turn off E2EE tomorrow.
"The only reason we currently have any message encryption is because a few tech companies have made the decision to protect as many as possible by releasing products which enable it (iOS, Whatsapp, and now texts via Google Messages)."
Completely false. Phil Zimmerman gave us PGP for free in 1991, and numerous open encryption standards now belong to the general public. Giving credit to Apple, Meta, and Google for this isn't just blatanly incorrect; it erases the hard work of genuinely good people, and shifts the credit to user-hostile mass surveillance corporations.
PGP et al is basically irrelevant given how few people use PGP compared to the >2.5 billion users that use Whatsapp and >1B using iMessage.
My wording wasn't exact; other encryption programs have enabled secure messaging, but without big players it would've been outlawed by now because it would've been easier to say "only criminals" use encrypted communication.
As for the "numerous open encryption standards", these are fairly irrelevant since the foremost goal is not encrypted messaging, but mostly for creating a secure way for business to interface with customers (can't run a startup or Fortune 500 business without being able to trust requests and responses). Getting people to use encrypted communications is the hard part, not designing the encryption or even implementing it.
iirc moxie built double-ratched in the same spirit as zimmerman built pgp and gave it away for free. thou he even went as far as integrating it into a mass-market product (wa) to twart the "only criminals" thing that seriously held back adoption of the latter throu export controls.
didn't help as much as they hoped, as there are no trustworthy platforms to run any of it.
A technology being published does not mean that it is available, especially for technologies that require uptake by the general public. And, well, PGP and GPG have reputations for such awful usability that they _might as well not exist_ as far as the general public is concerned. As another comment here mentions, just look at its uptake numbers! There are probalby more people qualified to do open-head neurosurgery than there are people who are qualified to use PGP. It's no more "available" than the C64 demoscene, orbital rocketry, or quantum physics. Signal and Apple and Google aren't being credited for developing the core tech, they're being credited for refining it until they can wrap it up in a package that's so user-friendly and low-friction that _every single person on the planet_ can use it.
The only "qualification" to use PGP is to read the manual.
You claim that _every single person on the planet_ can use the corporate apps, which implies that every person is able and willing to buy a device which can run them. Not everyone can buy a smartphone, and not everyone is willing to buy one for various reasons, but anyone with access to ANY computer can run PGP.
As long as computers exist, we'll have PGP. The other messengers rely on centralized infrastructure which could go down by accident or by hostile actors. Even Signal, which I love and recommend - and was not mentioned by the post I was replying to earlier (why?) - could easily end its services one day.
The wrong thinking I see in your post and the earlier one is this:
1. Lots of smart people create encryption schemes
2. Phil Zimmerman invents and releases PGP, giving the power of encryption to everyone with a computer.
3. Years pass...
4. In the smartphone era, Google, Facebook, and Apple incorporate encryption into their apps, in order to entice users to use their platforms and take their friends with them.
5. You and that other guy are all like, "Praise be to Google and Meta and Apple for giving us the power of encryption!"
WhatsApp uses the Signal protocol for its end-to-end encryption. The Signal Protocol was developed by Trevor Perrin and Moxie Marlinspike for Open Whisper System, their Open Source initiative.
> the author states that it's a moral duty of everyone to start encrypting their communications as a form of civil disobedience. It works when many (preferably most) people disobey.
I'd certainly support it. What he's calling for - it's similar to the dominant spirit in the US after the Edward Snowden revelations. It resulted in a lot of ethical and beneficial stuff happening in a relatively short amount of time.
Not just in tech, even news orgs lost much of their aversion to covering surveillance abuses. At least for a time.
