@aral
I understand your bad gut feeling about that. However, if they try introducing backdoors, I'll trust my beloved open source community to quickly figure that out.
Also, funding open source projects is sth I'd like to see our authorities doing much more than pouring shitloads of tax money into corps like Microsoft.
@aral I don't understand the controversy here, why is it that we fight for regular joes to have access to encrypted messaging but we draw the line at government services? The police (whatever your opinion of them) are currently not meant to be openly transparent, they have oversight boards for that reason.
Whether they are corrupted or not is also out of scope of this discussion, but it seems to me like a double standard to say "encryption for me, but not for you".
@devnull@aral
A lot of people are using encryption to protect themselves from states and police: queer people, anarchists, communists, antifascists, immigrants, drug users, sex workers, etc. Not because they’re corrupted, but because they’re working exactly as intended.
What’s the point of using Free Software if it’s to help the armed branch of proto-fascist states? Who are we trying to liberate with software and why, what’s the point? I think we have to remember that software is a tool that accomplish things (what?) for people (who?). Whatever oppressive institution using Free Software isn’t building a better future.
@melunaka@aral#floss software shouldn't be gated behind personal ethics and morals, as that goes against the whole concept of it being free / #libre. I may not agree with people who use my software, but I consider it being free/libre a net benefit to society.
@devnull@ohne_sonne@melunaka But if you go and speak at a freaking police conference, sell your wares to them, and then brag about it that says something rather different, no?
@devnull@aral That’s where I disagree. Free Software is very political, and the naming/marketing behind «Open Source» is a tentative to hide its revolutionary nature and make it capitalist-friendly. rms saw that groups could exercise power over others by preventing them to do something they should have the right to do.
To be get back on the subject, I’m not even talking of changing the license of Free Software to disallow use by police, but not actively collaborating with and promoting something that’s bad for society should be a baseline.
Surely we can agree that helping somebody do something unethical isn’t very ethical. You may not find it applies for police, but how would you feel if an organization helped installing Free Software on drone that kill people? Why should Free Software be outside of ethics, somehow?
@aral French here, pretty happy my gov uses matrix for high criticity messaging and PAYS. I'm ok with cops / gov using this as long as I can use them too.
@aral The opportunity to never recuperate your taken assets are very high. The absence of legitimate guidelines directing digital currency trades makes it a significant issue. There isn't a lot of that should be possible legitimately against a trade assuming your resource are taken.
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@aral I think this is cool and normal! Not all support of the police is the same. In fact, police and governments encrypting their communications seems like all good no bad, since the majority of what they talk about is likely to be sensitive data about citizens. The only downside is that maybe occasionally someone snoops unencrypted police comms to prove wrongdoing (has this ever happened? in the UK the recent scandal was of course around whatsapp messages)
Also encrypted messaging provider: "We host our platform on the computers of an exploitative billionaire that also host the CIA's cloud. We promised 7y ago you'll be able to use our service without a phone#, you got cyber-ponzi-currency scheme instead. We will never federate and if we don't like you we renounce to software freedom".
@aral
Just to be clear, they mean they provide the messaging service, i.e. helping to set up and maintain their own custom instance. They aren't saying that they are "selling" the user's messages.
@aral On the one hand, I get companies need to make money to survive and may do things other users of their products may not like to make that happen. And users always have the choice of going elsewhere.
On the other hand, the companies shrugging off long-time users questioning those practices has been really badly handled. Basically, “Meh. Whatever.” They should take some of that police force money and get some PR people into their ranks.
@aral The opportunity to never recuperate your taken assets are very high. The absence of legitimate guidelines directing digital currency trades makes it a significant issue. There isn't a lot of that should be possible legitimately against a trade assuming your resource are taken.
For more information and support kindly contact cyberhubrecoveryfirm@gmail.com
WhatsApp: +1(689)267-3744
+1(567)251-5998
You are trying to take a shortcut that doesn't exist.
As someone who has personally witnessed the use of violence by the police against peaceful demonstrators, I have to say that it makes no sense to call for a complete boycott of the police as a whole and hope that no one will implement any communication system for them.
I mean that the police are part of a system of power legitimized by most people who have blind faith in institutions. Even if it is important to demonstrate peacefully, we must not risk waging war between the poor while the system of power remains. The only solution is to raise people's awareness, it's a slow process and there are no shortcuts.
@alexl What does “waging war between the poor” mean? Who’s doing this and how are they doing it? Are Element poor? They have at least $30M in VC.
Also, raising awareness is a huge part of what I do. How do you propose we raise awareness without challenging crap like this? How does anything change if we remain quiet?
I’m sorry but, if anything, I’m more confused that before. I don’t understand what you’re criticising and why.
By poor I meant the cops, ACAB stands for All Cops Are Bastards.
I never said to be quiet, I was just suggesting to point higher...
And I think a wise person would not encourage boycotting such a pervasive institution as the police in such an ineffective way: you're basically making it a matter of principle, but which one? "No business with government institutions like the police"?
@aral Unfortunately you will have an hard time finding an open source company not selling their tech to the defense industry/police... They are often the most interested in this sort of technology and then you already have trouble to pay your employees you don't have the privileged to be picky. Source I have worked in an open source company and I'm familiar with the business model of a a few others.
@aral It's more true the other way around. Department of Defense is a big contributor to open source. I express my gratitude to the federal employees whose effort into designing and developing software for mandatory access control or mix networks.
@carlschwan Looks at self. Wonders, “do I even exist?"
We don’t. We would never.
(See, it’s really not that hard. Depends what you’re about. We’re not an enterprise software company but a not-for-profit working to safeguard human rights.)
@aral No matter what you think about the police – isn't it a good thing they do what they do without proprietary or unsafe stuff? I can only see how we would lose more if they did.
"Your city may be occupied by a violent gang of abusers and thugs who evict people from their homes, but surely it's better that those abusers and thugs use end to end encryption while they go around harassing people of color and the homeless, right?"
@dalias@steely_glint@aral If we want Police to use some tool of our choice we must take a legal route or hold protests to force them to use it. How is Element at fault if they are selling their services to the police? Should they stop making a free and open source encrypted communication platform? The people cancelling element, can you claim that you are not buying any product made by a company that sells it to the police?
@abhijith@steely_glint@aral The problematic aspects were mostly (1) their bad response, and (2) potential conflicts of interest between their paying customers and users of their core FOSS product.
@dalias@abhijith@aral They have made pretty serious organisational efforts to keep the money from influencing the OSS/protocol by having a separate foundation with an independent board hold them.
@abhijith@steely_glint@aral I would want to see things factored in a way that there's transparency about how the interests of unsavory commercial users against the interests of users of the FOSS products are prevented from affecting the FOSS product.
@dalias@steely_glint@aral Maybe Element and Police department can issue a jiont statement.. but I doubt the Police will care about Element's customer base.
I don't think they are marketing it to one police authority but to all govt services in whole EU and beyond - maybe looking for medium term opportunity as services move away from TETRA radio equipment to LTE (like civillian mobile phones, but on protected frequencies and/or with priority cell site access). I don't believe they want to backdoor the encryption, but to create servers with more monitoring/auditing of their users (for "control room" use)
@vfrmedia@abhijith@dalias@aral Yeah, and "But your ministry of education uses our e2e encrypted chat" is a pretty powerful reply to political forces who do want backdoors.
for most public service use cases (where all endpoints are connecting to an approved server) they don't even need any backdoor in the encryption; just suitable "bossware" on the server so they can intercept/monitor/log any messages going through it (the current voice-based AIrwave system used in UK has this functionality, and before that they often had recorders with huge spools of tape connected to the VHF/UHF repeaters)
@aral fair. Personally, assuming for the moment they hold my passport details, travel details etc, I would rather they used something reasonably secure, open source and not too expensive. Matrix is almost certainly better than some expensive closed source crap from a (different) telco or military off shoot.
@aral@steely_glint I don't know Matrix, so I can't speak about it, but you don't want to use something just because police or governments are using it? Bit silly thinking IMO
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