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Matthew Green is on BlueSky Profile picture
@matthew_d_green
Nov 15 • 4 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
Globally, state after state is hurtling towards digital surveillance just at a time when we need to be having a discussion about how to protect ourselves from the surveillance capabilities of the future. Here, Switzerland. tuta.com/blog/switzerla…Image
There are many problems with these ideas, not the least of which is that we’re asking for-profit companies to collect even more identifying information on users — information that (even if you fully trust the government) could end up breached or sold.
What I don’t understand about all of these plans (UK, Switzerland, the EU) is the absolute mad rush. Is there a crisis of dangerous crime suddenly in 2025 that needs to be addressed immediately, at any cost to privacy? We can’t wait a few years for safer technology?
I mean, maybe the answer is “yes”. Maybe there’s a global crisis so severe that all user privacy and anonymity needs to be eliminated, so that all communications and web browsing can be surveilled. Whatever it is, it’s so terrifying that governments are keeping it very secret.

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More from @matthew_d_green

Matthew Green is on BlueSky Profile picture
Oct 15
The “age verification” and the “human identification” problem are the same problem. It upsets me to be around people who think they’re working on the first, but don’t understand they’re actually working on the second.
To be really clear: it’s pretty obvious that the central (Internet communication) problem of our time is going to be determining whether the stranger you’re talking to (or delivering ads to) is a person or a bot. And every existing tech we have for doing this will fail.
So how do we do this? Presumably by tightly binding physical identity to your device and then proving possession (with some other bells and whistles). Not coincidentally that’s exactly what age verification is. Weird how corporate and gov’t priorities suddenly align, right?
Read 10 tweets
Matthew Green is on BlueSky Profile picture
Aug 5
Trying to plan a seminar on the topic of “how do we maintain privacy in the coming dystopia” and it’s kind of a thing.
Over the past thirty years we’ve done amazing thing technologically when it comes to anonymity and privacy, and to some extent it was “all theoretical” that we’d need it. That’s all behind us.
So here we are in the bad timeline. Social networks want to jam AI into your encrypted messages; governments want to access your private messages; everyone you maybe once hoped to rely on is either planning to sell you out or else trying to find the fastest way to monetize you.
Read 5 tweets
Matthew Green is on BlueSky Profile picture
Jul 29
I cannot tell what’s going on with Google here. washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/…
Specifically, Google when asked by a US senator could easily have denied that the UK was pressuring them, but instead said this. Image
If you call someone in their home and ask them if someone has a gun to their head, and they say “I can’t talk about that” then you call 911 because that’s what common sense tells you to do.
Read 6 tweets
Matthew Green is on BlueSky Profile picture
Apr 24
It is insane how scary the threat models of encrypted messaging apps providers are.
You have these apps with billions of users. Some of those users are doing huge financial transactions. Some are politicians. Some are coordinating literal national security operations. And all these messages go through a few vulnerable servers.
I think older people (that includes me I guess) think that messaging apps are like AOL Instant Messenger, not used for anything important. It’s completely insane how much of our society now runs on them, and what a total disaster it would be if a couple of major apps were broken.
Read 11 tweets
Matthew Green is on BlueSky Profile picture
Mar 27
Ok, look people: Signal as a *protocol* is excellent. As a service it’s excellent. But as an application running on your phone, it’s… an application running on your consumer-grade phone. The targeted attacks people use on those devices are well known. Image
There is malware that targets and compromises phones. There has been malware that targets the Signal application. It’s an app that processes many different media types, and that means there’s almost certainly a vulnerability to be exploited at any given moment in time.
If you don’t know what this means, it means that you shouldn’t expect Signal to defend against nation-state malware. (But you also shouldn’t really expect any of the other stuff here, like Chrome, to defend you in that circumstance either.)
Read 5 tweets
Matthew Green is on BlueSky Profile picture
Mar 25
You should use Signal. Seriously. There are other encrypted messaging apps out there, but I don’t have as much faith in their longevity. In particular I have major concerns about the sustainability of for-profit apps in our new “AI” world.
I have too many reasons to worry about this but that’s not really the point. The thing I’m worried about is that, as the only encrypted messenger people seem to *really* trust, Signal is going to end up being a target for too many people.
Signal was designed to be a consumer-grade messaging app. It’s really, really good for that purpose. And obviously “excellent consumer grade” has a lot of intersection with military-grade cryptography just because that’s how the world works. But it is being asked to do a lot!
Read 9 tweets

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