Meredith Whittaker of Signal Criticizes Anti-Encryption Efforts as ‘Parochial, Magical Thinking’

AI is “not open in any sense,” the battle over encryption is far from won, and Signal’s principled (and uncompromising) approach may complicate interoperability efforts, warned the company’s president, Meredith Whittaker. But it’s not all bad news.

(Actually, it is all bad news, because I wrote up the good news separately.)

Speaking onstage with me at StrictlyVC LA, Whittaker called out a resurgence of legislative attacks on encryption as “magical thinking.”

“We’re seeing a number of, I would say, parochial and very politically motivated pieces of legislation often indexed on the idea of protecting children. And these have been used to push for something that’s actually a very old wish of security services, governments autocrats, which is to systematically backdoor strong encryption,” said Whittaker. “Often, I believe, pushed by well-meaning people who just don’t have the knowledge or education to understand the implications 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.

An encryption exodus looms over UK’s Online Safety Bill

“The overall theme I’m seeing is a deep desire for accountability in tech, which we saw sort of animated mid-2010s. That, then, has been weaponized, and I think we’re seeing surveillance wine in accountability bottles,” she said.

“‘Accountability’ looks like more monitors, more oversights, more back doors, more elimination of places where people can express or communicate freely, instead of actually checking on the business models that have created, you know, massive platforms whose surveillance advertising modalities can be easily weaponized for information ops, or doxing, or whatever it is, right? There’s an unwillingness to hit at the root of the problem. And instead, what we see is effectively proposals to extend surveillance into government and NGO sectors in the name of accountability.”

One proposal of note originates from the Investigatory Powers Act in the United Kingdom, where the government has been known to block global app updates they see as a risk to their national security.

“The IPA essentially asserts that any tech company, regardless of location, must consult with the UK government prior to distributing a security patch, as the government may be exploiting that patch for their own purposes. This is a type of insular, idealistic perception,” Whittaker disclosed.

“This is a hazardous scenario as it could regress us to a time prior to the liberalization of encryption in 1999, a sort of early ’90s model where the government monopolizes encryption and digital privacy rights. The ability to disseminate encryption or privacy updates, or anything that might safeguard and reinforce your service is something that now necessitates government approval.”

“To be frank,” she continued, “I believe that the VC community and larger tech firms need to acknowledge this threat to the industry and take stronger action.”

Signal president Meredith Whittaker and Devin Coldewey at StrictlyVC LA. Image Credits: TechCrunch

The EU is currently considering the Digital Markets Act, which would introduce a messaging interoperability mandate. However, this regulation could potentially present hidden troubles.

“The general idea of this mandate is reasonable, but realistically, Signal can’t cooperate with other messaging platforms unless they significantly improve their privacy measures,” explained Whittaker. “This means not just encrypting message content using the Signal protocol, but also encrypting metadata, profile names and pictures, contact lists, and information about when and who you communicate with. A unified privacy and security standard would have to be agreed with any platform we decide to cooperate with.”

Whittaker sees a potential risk in this situation: the watering down of security and privacy for the sake of convenience. “It might actually lower the privacy standard, creating a interoperating monolith that further marginalizes those demanding high integrity privacy standards.” He noted, somewhat ironically, the notion of Apple being exempted from this regulation could result in a hopelessly fragmented system.

In the private sector, Whittaker was quick to label the rising Nvidia a monopolist.

“They have managed to monopolize the chip market — as well as the CUDA market,” she stated, alluding to the exclusive computational architecture that is integral to a lot of high-performance computing nowadays.

How much are Nvidia’s competitors funding startups? We conducted a research

On inquiring if she reckons the corporation has turned threatening owing to its power accumulation, she stated.

“I mean, we have a lot of Spider-Men pointing at each other, right? I’m seeing Microsoft pointing fingers at Nvidia now, and saying, if you’re worried about monopoly, do not look to poor Microsoft, look to Nvidia, they’re the ones, and you also look to Google. Google put out this sort of PR missive last week, kind of their AI access principles, and they talked about Google being the only vertically integrated company from app store to chips. And that’s true, right? But then Google published a couple of days later, like Microsoft is actually the monopoly because it has the OpenAI and sort of the Azure monopoly, right?

“So like, no one is innocent here. There’s a lot of like, ‘We’re all trying to find the guy who did this …’” (i.e., the famous ‘hot dog guy’ meme lifted from “I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson”).

“I think we need to recognize that AI is dependent on Big Tech. It requires Big Tech resources. It is not open in any sense,” she said. “We can be honest that, if you need $100 million for a training run, that is not an open resource, right? If you need $100 million to deploy at scale for a month, that is not open, right? So we need to be honest about how we’re using these terms. But I don’t want the deflection toward Nvidia as the culprit of the week to detract from what we’re dealing with this massively concentrated power.”

You can watch the full interview below.

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