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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

Like trying to scrutinize the motives of a complete lunatic.

Here’s the thing though: if even some of the examples given in the state department page are true (some of them are rather silly), that A/I knowingly provided services to groups that verifiably did some rather violent things they are accused of, I’m not sure how they expected to hide behind their mission.

My impression is that they didn’t say “hey we don’t have customer information but we don’t service violent groups and we will responsibly investigate and discontinue service to offenders.”

Their vibe was much more defiant, like, “we designed this to be anonymous and specifically intend/expect for it to be used in any way regardless of legality and are okay with it.”

Is it right for the US to be the global arbiter of this issue and domains in general? Of course not.

> A/I knowingly provided services to groups that verifiably did some rather violent things they are accused of

If that's disqualifying, a lot of US government contractors are in trouble.

Or J6.

> “we designed this to be anonymous and specifically intend/expect for it to be used in any way regardless of legality and are okay with it.”

That is also what Signal does. Or absolutely any end-to-end encrypted communication service at all - these are explicitly designed not to retain details of communication.

Do you want to declare them terrorists too?

What Signal does is different than what A/I was in a number of ways.

Please elaborate!

You won't elaborate though, just make vague accusations.

I think the difference they alluded to is that they manually vetoed new users, presumably based on their self-declared goals and ideology, whereas Signal etc are neutral platforms.

Yeah I didn’t elaborate since this was explained elsewhere in the thread.

The A/I vetting was in the form of a form asking why do you want A/I email or blog. You could write anything in it.

Meanwhile, Signal requires a phone number, so it knows much more about your identity than A/I did.

How do you know what the A/I vetting consisted of or what standards they held? They don't seem to have published any detailed description of the process, and by their own account they destroyed all records of the vetting after approval.

Maybe they clicked on the signup form while it was still live. You know, to gather actual information instead of speculating.

Several fediverse instances have the same thing. It's just a freeform textbox saying why do you want an account.

Again, I'm working off of the only actual information I'm aware of, A/I's self-description of how the process works. If someone has more information they should provide it rather than relying on maybes! The existence of an intake form, to be clear, doesn't really suggest that form is the extent of the process or that any reasonable answers are accepted.

Which terrorists and criminals are texting right now on Signal? You (and hopefully Signal) have no idea whatsover, that's the point of privacy.

Now, if you are against private conversations, please state so clearly so we know which side of the fence you lean towards.

I disagree in more ways, so that invalidates your comment xoxox

They're saying the difference is that Signal doesn't say it. If you ask Signal about their support of terrorist groups, they'll say Signal doesn't allow terrorism on its platform (even though it obviously does since it has no way to know). Those are the Right Words. If you ask A/I, they said they didn't care if someone was a terrorist. Those are the Wrong Words. There's a social game being played at the highest levels that A/I have forfeited.

in interviews, they said if you give them examples of "xyz" is prohibited by applicable law, they would remove it. They would not help you spy on them probably, by backdooring their infra or sth.

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