My interview with Steven Levy re. leaking of my Facebook Goodbye post

The use of force generally leaves evidence of its use, however. If the government cuts the door off your safe, and doesn't have a warrant to conduct that search, then the facts will speak for themselves when you avail yourself of your rights - e.g. to have evidence from an unlawful search suppressed in court and the subsequent civil rights lawsuit.

This is where the analogy breaks down - introducing backdoors and passkeys into digital security doesn't create the same trail in the physical world.

The better analogy would be - imagine that the government insisted that all locks be approved by the government, on the understanding that those locks would have master keys that the government owned. They would be able to come to a bank during the night, unlock the front door, the vault, and your safe deposit box; or come into your home when you were at work, unlock your filing cabinet and look at your records.

You would have to trust that government employees who had access to the master keys would only use them for legitimate purposes, and when authorized to do so. You would have to trust that the government could secure those keys at all times so they never fell into the wrong hands, and that no unauthorized duplicates would be made.

You would have to do all those things bearing in mind that the government regularly loses such master keys, has employees that exceed their authority, misuse government resources, demonstrate poor custody practices, and so on.

It doesn't seem like a good bet to me.

EDIT: oh yes, and I forgot to mention there's a whole bunch of other bad actors out there who know how to buy a government-approved lock, take it apart, and are highly motivated to make their own master keys.

The distinction between "public" and "private" is gray and messy when it comes to corporate social media platforms. Is anything really private? How do you send a message to someone in Messenger? You're not sending the HTTP request to person X. You're sending it to Facebook with metadata that says "please make this visible to person X and consider it private". Then Facebook keeps the message and decides whether or not to publish it onward to person X, and whether or not to display it to anyone else (internally, externally, in logs, etc.). It's not like a package that gets sent over to person X's house. It stays on Facebook's property at all times.

When you post something to "your" feed, you're sending it to Facebook with metadata that says "please post this on my wall" or whatever.

To strain an analog analogy, this is not like the telephone or even the post office, where you hand them something or send out voice packets and they just look at the recipient and forward it on to the actual person. Everything you send is sent to Facebook and kept at Facebook.

Replace "Facebook" above with any social media platform or cloud service. They're fundamentally the same. I don't consider iCloud photos private. You're sending your content to Apple, not putting it in some safe that you alone control.

How would thousands of competing networks deal with a government-enforced “no E2EE; wiretapping API required” law?

the future will not be censorship but categories, so people will not get banned, they will get labeled and you will filter tags out, those tags will be connected to a person, if you don’t like a tag you will see less of that persons content. this will be useful in keeping the peace. it’ll mess up dialogue but most people have a hard to with empathy these days. so maybe certain sections will have open discussions for people who are okay with seeing content from other tags, and are okay with engaging with that content. right now dating apps will forever ban your account if you engage a certain way with the opposite sex, so in many cases a match will get banned because the person they matched with did not like their content. but that does not mean someone else won’t like their content. so the people who have the most in common including their communication styles should be allowed to still engage with each other without getting banned by someone else’s arbitrary rules that are subjective depending on a persons upbringing.

> We have done a shit job so far of managing ourselves. Sure in lots of cases we have made the world a better place but I think we need to be honest with ourselves and acknowledge that greed has crept in and supplanted that "making the world a better place" mission.

I think "we" have been largely absent from the conversation as heard by the rest of society. You can't say "trust the software engineers" like you can say "trust the doctors," not because we don't have ethics or expertise, but because what most people think of as the voices of our profession are the PR mouthpieces for companies like Facebook and Google.

Speaking person to person and in online forums such as this, you'll find most engineers concerned about privacy and the societal and emotional harm of social media, and reflexively distrustful of corporations that speak about issues they have a financial stake in. But that's not what non-engineers think we think. The assumption seems to be, well, you're a techie, so of course you uncritically embrace all that stuff. People who know me better and know I don't think that way seem to regard me as less of a techie for that reason, which goes to show how little they are aware of sentiment in our profession. I think that's what we need to fix.

A profession like medicine suffers a little bit from the same bias, where people tend to assume that doctors are personally pro-surgery, pro-drugs, etc., but doctors have a professional structure that creates recognized authorities, which means journalists have somebody to talk to when they want to get the overall take of "doctors" on an issue where their expertise applies. When writing about a public health issue, journalists have no problem getting an independent perspective from doctors with credibility, relevant expertise, and no direct financial stake in the issue.

Software is in a position analogous to if the only doctors visible in the media were PR flacks for hospitals and pharmaceutical companies.

A big cultural difference between medicine and software is that doctors are traditionally trained to bear the mantle of authority. They are trained that commanding the trust and respect of patients is vital to providing care to them, and that it is a skill separate from and equally necessary to the technical skills that make a doctor worthy of that respect. Tech people are socialized to beware of the dangers of authority and distrust those who seek it. I may be speaking as an old-timer here, but when I was young, I learned to lionize the scientists and engineers who rejected the accoutrements of authority, who wore cheap and frumpy clothes, who let their hair go crazy, who reveled in stories of their own stupid mistakes, who actively punctured the mystique of authority so that they would only have as much respect as their knowledge and achievements alone would earn them.

In other words, medicine comes from an old tradition, which long accepted that wielding authority and being worthy of it were separate skills. Keeping the two connected was a moral responsibility that fell on individual doctors and on the profession as a whole. The tradition of software is much younger and was much more deeply marked by the counterculture, which took an opposite approach to the problem of authority, declaring that we could and should unlearn our reflexive deference to the superficial aspect of authority and replace it with a critical, informed consumption of the expertise of other members of society. To the counterculture mindset, it was unacceptable that society should be at the mercy of the closed ranks of a profession privileged by its exclusive knowledge.

I think that the counterculture perspective was an important corrective, but it is incomplete, because the problem of authority hasn't gone away. Even if we despise authority, we still depend on it, so the question is: how should we as a profession create and elevate professional authority? How do we make it possible for a journalist to easily get a read on what software engineers think as professionals, distinct from the official line of large corporate employers of software engineers?

Maybe software needs a replacement for the old professional societies, except with an emphasis on policy and public education, instead of expensive journals and social events designed to help you find your way into the old boys' club. I have no idea what such a group would look like, though.