The arrest of telegram founder Pavel Durov bothers me. As someone raised in the US, I have a fairly deep seated belief in freedom of speech, association and freedom from unreasonable searches. To see someone who enabled this in the digital age arrested for enabling these freedoms, someone who no less had to flee Russia to do it, bothers me.

Part of me says “OK, let’s find/create some tech to enable private communication, but that’s what Pavel did. And The Powers That Be don’t like it.

I see parallels to my early work in security. “If we can just find the right tech, all the security problems will be solved: Firewalls, Anti-Virus, Spam Filters, ….”. But the problem was social, not purely technical. The same seems to be true with private communication in the digital age. The problem is human nature: people in power want to control the dialog, they want to dictate the bounds of acceptable discussion.

So maybe I’ll look deeper in to Signal, Nostr or other alternatives (suggestions?) so I can use them and recommend them to people needing private communications. I think I just won’t have the illusion this time that tech can solve the problem.

This is post #6/8 for Blaugust 2024. Joining late. I think I can make 8 posts :-)