Meredith Whittaker practices what she preaches. As chair of the Signal Foundation, she is a powerful voice advocating for privacy for all. But she doesn’t just spout empty words.
In 2018, she entered the public eye as one of the organizers of the Google strikes, mobilizing 20,000 of the search giant’s employees in a dual protest against the company’s support for state surveillance and its shortcomings on sexual misconduct.
Even now, after half a decade in the public eye, with congressional testimony, university professors and advisory roles at federal agencies under her belt, Whittaker remains deeply privacy conscious.
It’s not unusual for business leaders to politely deflect the question when asked, for example, about their pay for the resume that accompanies these interviews. It is slightly less common to flatly refuse to comment on their age and family. “As a privacy advocate, Whittaker does not answer personal questions that could be used to derive her passwords or ‘secret answers’ for her bank authentication,” an employee said after the interview. “She encourages others to follow suit!”
When she left Google, Whittaker shared a note internally that made it clear that she was committed to the ethical use of artificial intelligence and organizing a “responsible technology industry.” She said: “It’s clear that Google is not the place where I can continue this work.” That clarity and lack of willingness to compromise led to Signal.
Founded in 2017 with $50 million in funding from WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, the Signal Foundation exists to “protect free speech and enable secure global communications through open source privacy technology.”
It took over development of its messaging app, also called Signal, in 2018, and Whittaker came on board in the newly created role of president in 2022 – just in time to start defending Signal, and encryption in general, against a wave of attacks from nation states and corporations around the world.
Legislation such as the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) and the EU’s Child Sexual Abuse Regulations contained language that could be used to ban or crack private communications, while Meta’s proposals call for end-to-end encryption for Facebook and Instagram to enable a vicious circle. response from politicians such as Priti Patel, who branded the plans as ‘catastrophic’ as Britain’s Home Secretary.
These attacks are nothing new, Whittaker says when we meet in the Observer offices. “You can go back to 1976, then [Whitfield] Diffie and [Martin] Hellman tried to publish the article that introduced public key cryptography, the technique that allows us to have encrypted communications over the Internet that work. There were intelligence services that tried to prevent this.
“In the 1980s there was great unrest about the idea that the NSA [US National Security Agency] and GCHQ would lose its monopoly on encryption, and by the 1990s it would be covered by arms treaties – these are the ‘crypto wars’. You couldn’t send your code to someone in Europe by post; it was considered an ammunition export.”
But then the enormous push to commercialize the Internet softened it – to some extent. “Encryption for transactions was made possible and large companies were allowed to choose exactly what was encrypted. At the same time, the Clinton administration approved surveillance advertising as a business model, so there was an incentive to collect data on your customers to sell to them.”
Surveillance, she says, has been a “disease” from the very beginning of the Internet, and encryption is “a serious threat to the kind of power that shapes itself through these information asymmetries.” All of this means she doesn’t expect the fight to end anytime soon. “I don’t think these arguments are made in good faith. There is a deeper tension here, because in the twenty years of this metastatic technology industry’s development, we have seen every aspect of our lives subjected to mass surveillance by a handful of companies working in concert with the US government and other ‘Five Eyes’ agencies. to collect more surveillance data on us than has ever been available to any entity in human history.
“So if we don’t continue to police and eventually expand on these little privacy exceptions — we’re going to have to cut a few elbows to get a little more room here — I think we’re in for a much bleaker future.” than we ever would. If we can maintain this position and increase the space for privacy and free communication.”
The criticism of encrypted communications is as old as technology: allowing anyone to speak without the state eavesdropping on his or her conversations is a godsend for criminals, terrorists and pedophiles around the world.
But, Whittaker argues, few of Signal’s loudest critics seem consistent in what they consider important. “If we really want to help children, why are Britain’s schools crumbling? Why were social services funded at only 7% of the amount proposed to fully fund the agencies on the front line of stopping abuse?”
Sometimes the criticism comes more unexpectedly. Signal was recently drawn into America’s culture wars after a failed right-wing campaign to oust National Public Radio’s new CEO, Katherine Maher, extended to Signal, where Maher sits on the board of directors. Elon Musk got involved, promoting conspiracy theories that the Signal app – which he once promoted – had “known vulnerabilities,” in response to a claim that the app “may have been compromised.”
The accusations were “a weapon in a propaganda war to spread disinformation,” Whittaker said. “We are seeing similar disinformation, which often seems designed to push people away from Signal, linked to escalations in the conflict in Ukraine. We believe these campaigns are designed to drive people away from Signal and toward less secure alternatives that may be more susceptible to hacking and interception.”
The same technology that brings basic criticism has made it popular among governments and militaries around the world, which need to protect their own conversations from the prying eyes of state hackers and others.
Whittaker sees this as an equalizer: Signal is for everyone.
“Signal works for everyone or for no one. Every military in the world uses Signal, and every politician I know uses Signal. Every CEO I know uses Signal because anyone who has something truly confidential to communicate realizes that storing it in a metadatabase or on a Google server is not good practice.”
Whittaker’s vision is unique and does not cause distraction. Despite her interest in AI, she is wary of combining it with Signal and is critical of apps like Meta’s WhatsApp that have introduced AI-enabled features.
“I’m really proud that we don’t have an AI strategy. We should look ourselves in the eye and ask: where does that data come from to train the models, where does the input data come from? How did we get an AI strategy given that our entire focus is on preserving privacy and not on surveilling people?”
Whatever the future holds in terms of technology and political views on privacy, Whittaker is convinced that its principles are an existential issue.
“We will keep the line well. We would rather abandon our continuity than undermine or chase the privacy guarantees we offer people.”
CV
Age No comment.
Family No comment.
Education I studied literature and rhetoric at Berkeley before joining Google in 2006, where I learned the rest.
Pay No comment.