How could tools, techniques, and procedures used in the U.S., as outlined in the RAND report for example, be used by authoritarian governments to enhance their government’s power at the expense of their citizenry? What, if anything, can or should be done to counteract this?
As the EFF website mentioned, WhatsApp’s parent company, facebook respects the users of WhatsApp as much as they respect facebook users, which is to say, not at all.
As FB has repeatedly admitted to sharing peoples private information, it may be prudent to not rely on social media sites and apps like facebook and whatsapp to protect yourself from any government body.
One clear alternative appears to be the program Signal. Having recently stood up to the Australian Government, it’s refreshing to see an app developer respect the privacy of it’s users.
From the developer Joshua Lund’s blog:
By design, Signal does not have a record of your contacts, social graph, conversation list, location, user avatar, user profile name, group memberships, group titles, or group avatars. The end-to-end encrypted contents of every message and voice/video call are protected by keys that are entirely inaccessible to us. In most cases now we don’t even have access to who is messaging whom.
Stands like this, and apparent app transparency lead me to believe that tooks like Signal could be the next iteration of tools used to defy an authoritarian government.