Moxie Marlinspike (owner of the world's greatest name) is the lead of the Signal project is often described as an anarchist (as in this wired article: https://www.wired.com/2016/07/meet-moxie-marlinspike-anarchi..., which is better than it's headline).
He is not, in truth, an anarchist. He is a crypto-zealot, most definitely eccentric, and opposed to a lot of government intrusion. In today's world, I guess that's an anarchist
He's also the creator of the Anarchist Yacht Club and has produced voice content for Audio Anarchy audiobooks. In his documentary about sailing (Hold Fast, it's really good) he flies a black flag.
Just saying, there is more evidence towards his anarchism than just zealousness towards crypto.
An anarchist who works to get all the major messaging platforms end-to-end encrypted, so that normal people who don't think to explicitly opt-in to encryption get the benefits by default? Makes perfect sense to me.
WhatsApp was (maybe still is?) the most popular messaging application in the world. Getting it E2E encrypted is a huge coup.
true, but storing all conversation histories locally and in the cloud is an anti-coup. Not that Moxie had any influence on these decisions one way or the other (to the best of my knowledge).
The upshot is I worry that E2E encryption has given folks a false sense of security.
I'm probably not here for the accelerationist argument that the most popular messaging application in the world should be kept unencrypted in the hopes that it would get people to move to better applications.
E2E means it is encrypted before transmission, so if that data is stored in the cloud, wouldn't that mean that it would remain encrypted if it does get stored in the cloud?
WhatsApp has gotten more people to use E2E encryption than any other product in human history. By many orders of magnitude. If you believe that people should use E2E encryption there is no better product to work on.
