What Led to the Creation of Signal

There's like, there's two ways to think about security. One is like computer security, this idea that we'll somehow make computers secure. We'll put information on the computers and then we'll prevent other people from accessing those computers. And that is like a losing strategy that people have been losing for 30 years. Information ends up on a computer somewhere and it ends up compromised in the end. The other way to think about security is information security, where you secure the information itself that you don't have to worry about the security of the computers. You could have some computers in the cloud somewhere, information's flowing through them and people can compromise those things and it doesn't really matter because the information itself is encrypted. And so, things like SMS, the iMessage cloud backups, most other messengers, Facebook messenger, all that stuff, they're relying on this computer security model and that ends up disappointing people in the end. And so, why did you guys create it? What was unsatisfactory about the other options that were available? Well, because the way the internet works today is insane. Fundamentally, I feel like private communication is important because I think that change happens in private. Everything that is fundamentally decent today started out as something that was a socially unacceptable idea at the time. You look at things like obvious things, abolition of slavery, legalization of marijuana, legalization of same-sex marriage, even constructing the Declaration of Independence. Those are all things that required a space for people to process ideas outside the context of everyday life. And those spaces don't exist on the internet today and I think it's kind of crazy the way the internet works that if you imagined every moment that you were talking to somebody in real life, there was somebody there just with a clipboard, a stranger, taking notes about what you said. That would change the character of your conversations and I think that in some ways, like we're living through a shortage of brave or bold or courageous ideas in part because people don't have the space to process what's happening in their lives outside of the context of everyday interactions. That's a really good way to put it because you gotta give people a chance to think things through but if you do that publicly, they're not going to. They're going to sort of like basically what you see on Twitter. If you stray from what is considered to be the acceptable norm or the current ideology or whatever opinions you're supposed to have on a certain subject, you get attacked ruthlessly so. So you see a lot of self-censorship and you also see a lot of virtue signaling where people sort of pretend that they espouse a certain series of ideas because that'll get them some social cred. Yeah, exactly. I think that communication in those environments is performative. You're either performing for an angry mob, you're performing for advertisers, you're performing for the governments that are watching. And I think also the ideas that make it through are kind of tainted as a result. Did you watch any of the online hearing stuff that was happening over COVID where city councils and stuff were having their hearings online? No, I did not. It was kind of interesting to me because they can't meet in person so they're doing it online. And that means that the public comment period was also online. And so it used to be that if you go to a city council meeting, they have a period of public comment where people could just stand up and say what you think. And ordinarily it's like, oh, you gotta go to city hall, you gotta wait in line, you gotta sit there. But then when it's on Zoom, it's just sort of like, anyone can just show up on the Zoom thing. They just dial in and they're just like, here's what I think. And it was kind of interesting because particularly when a lot of the police brutality still was happening in Los Angeles, I was watching the city council hearings and people were just like, they were just calling to me like, fuck you, I yield the rest of my time, fuck you. It was just like really brutal and not undeservedly so. And what was interesting to me was just watching the politicians basically who just had to sit there and it was just like, you get three minutes and then there's someone else, and they're just like, okay, and now we'll hear from, like, and watching that you sort of realize that it's like, to be a politician, you have to just sort of fundamentally not really care what people think of you. You have to fundamentally just be comfortable sitting and having people yell at you for three minute increments for an hour or whatever. And so it seems like what we've sort of done is like bred these people who are willing to do that. And in some ways that's like a useful characteristic, but in other ways that's the characteristic of a psychopath. Yes, yes. And I think what we're seeing is that that also extends outside of those environments. To do anything ambitious today requires that you just are comfortable with that kind of feedback. Like Trump's tweets. If you watch, you know, if you look at Twitter and look at any of Trump's tweets, when he tweets, watch what people say. It's ruthless. They go crazy, they go so hard at him. So I'm assuming he doesn't read them. I'm assuming he just, or maybe he does and just doesn't say anything, but he doesn't go back and forth with people at least. No, but and I think Trump is perfectly capable of just not caring. There's like people like, you know, crazy, he's just like, yeah, whatever, I'm the best, they don't, you know. And like that's, you know, that's politics, but I think, you know, the danger is when that, you know, to do anything ambitious, you know, outside of politics or whatever, you know, requires that you're capable of just not caring, you know, what people think or whatever, because everything is happening in public. I think you made a really good point in that change comes from people discussing things privately because you have to, it's a, you have to be able to take a chance. You have to be daring and you have to be able to confide in people and you have to be able to say, hey, this is not right and we're gonna do something about it. If you do that publicly, the powers that be that do not want change in any way, shape or form, they'll come down on you. And this is essentially what Edward Snowden was warning everyone about when he decided to go public with all this NSA information. He was saying, look, this is not what we signed up for. You look, someone's constantly monitoring your emails, constantly listening to phone calls. Like this is not this mass surveillance thing. It's very bad for just the culture of free expression, just our ability to have ideas and to be able to share them back and forth and vet them out. It's very bad. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think when you look at the history of that kind of surveillance, there are a few interesting inflection points. At the beginning of the internet as we know it and like the early to mid 90s, there were these like DOD efforts to do mass surveillance. And they were sort of open about what they were doing. And one of them was this program called Total Information Awareness. And it was, they were trying to start this office, I think called the Total Awareness Office or something within the DOD. The idea was like, they're just gonna like collect information on all Americans and everyone's communication and just stockpile it into these databases. And then they would use that to mind those things for information. It was sort of like their effort to get in on this at the beginning of the information age. And it was ridiculous. It's like they called it Total Information Awareness. They had a logo that was like, the pyramid with the eye on top of it. Oh yeah, this is their logo. Oh God. The pyramid with the eye like casting a beam on the earth. That bit of Latin there means knowledge is power. Oh wow. And interesting, this program was actually started by John Poindexter of all people who was involved in the Iran-Contra stuff, I think. Really? Yeah, yeah. And he like went to jail for a second and was pardoned or something. So anyway, you know, they were like. It's just so fucked up that these people are in charge of anything. I know, but what's also, I just kind of comical is they were like, this is what we're gonna do. Look at how crazy this is. This is our plan, you know, and people were like, uh, I don't think so. You know, like. What year was this? This was like early mid 90s. Look at this, authentication, biometric data, face, fingerprints, gate, iris, your gate. So they're gonna identify people based on the way they walk. I guess your gate is that specific. And then automated virtual data repositories, privacy and security. This is fascinating. Because if you look at, I mean, obviously no one thought of cell phones back then. Exactly, right. So this is like kind of amateurish, right? So it's like, they're like, this is what we're gonna do. And people were like, uh, I don't think so. Even like Congress is like, uh, guys, I don't think we can like approve this. Like you need a better logo, you know. For sure. But it's just this whole flow chart. Is that what this would be? What do you call something like this? What is called flow chart, I guess, sort of. Designed to dazzle you and approving their funnels. It's like baffling to figure out what it is. Like, first of all, what are all those little color tubes? Those little ones, those little cylinders. Those are data silos. Oh, that's the universal. They're all different colors. There's purple ones. What's in the purple data? Well, gate maybe. That's prints. That's where gate lives, yeah. It's all prints' information. But so, okay, so that, you know, this stuff all sort of got shut down, right? Yeah. They're like, okay, we can't do this, you know. And then instead, what ended up happening was like data naturally accumulated in different places. You know, that, you know, like back then, if you had been, you know, what they were trying to do is be like, our proposal is that everyone carry a government mandated tracking device at all times. Like, what do you guys think? You know, it'll make us safer, you know. And people were like, no, I don't think so, you know. But instead, everyone ended up just carrying cell phones at all times, which are tracking your location and reporting them into centralized repositories that government has access to, you know. And so, you know, this sort of like oblique surveillance infrastructure ended up emerging. And that was what, you know, people sort of knew about, but, you know, didn't really know. And that's what Snowden revealed. It was like, you know, we all have this. Instead, it's like all of those things are happening naturally, you know. Your, you know, gate detection, fingerprint, you know. Like, all this stuff's happening naturally. It's ending up in these places. And then, you know, governments are just going to those places and getting the information. Catch new episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience for free, only on Spotify. Watch back catalog JRE videos on Spotify, including clips, easily, seamlessly switch between video and audio experience. 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