standard, especially by those users whose physical safety actually depends on
the security of their communications – those user profiles we defined as ‘high
risk’ in Chapter 1. Indeed, the effect of SMS 1.0 on ‘real life’, relating both to
how it was engineered and presented, appears as one of the primary motivations
to move towards a second version, as we will explore further in the following
section of this chapter.

‘SECURITY IS HARD TO MEASURE’: REVISITING THE SMS,
(RE-) DEFINING SECURITY

In the interviews we conducted with them, EFF members describe how, since
the early days of the SMS's first version, there had been an ongoing process of
thinking back to the different categories. Taking into consideration what actors
in the encryption community considered ‘errors’ (shortcomings, misleading
presentations, approximations, problematic inferences), and revisiting their
own doubts and the selection processes used during the making of 1.0, the EFF
team started to analyse how the choice of these categories contributed towards
building specific understandings of encryption and security. With this in mind,
they started to consider how the categories could evolve – and with them, the
definitions of ‘good encryption’ and ‘good security’ they presented/suggested
to the world.

*Questioning the grid: Incommensurability of criteria and the ‘empty tier’*

A first, fundamental level at which the reflection took place concerned the choice
of the format itself. The feedback on the first version of the SMS revealed that
in the attempt to be of use to both developers and users, the scorecard might
have ended up as problematic for both:

We got a lot of feedback from security researchers who thought that it was
far too simplified and that it was making some tools look good because they
have hit all the checkmarks even though they were not actually good tools.
So we ended up in a little bit in between zone, where it was not really simple
enough for end users to really understand it correctly, but it was also too
simple from an engineering standpoint (R1).

But in the making of the second version, according to R2, they wanted ‘to
make sure [...] that we can put out something that we’re confident about, that
is correct and is not going to confuse potential users’. Especially in light of the
meanings that users bestowed upon SMS 1.0, a key question arose: was a grid
the most useful and effective way to go? Perhaps the very idea of providing cri-
teria or categories was not suitable in this regard; perhaps the updated project
should not take the form of a grid, to avoid the impression of prescription or
instruction to users that may previously have been given by ‘cutting up’ such a
complex question into neat categories. As R2 explained, while discussing the
possibility of creating a second version of the scorecard,

we are definitely abandoning the sort of grid of specific check boxes [...]
A table seems to present cold hard facts in this very specific way. It is very
easy to be convinced and it's very official [...] we are definitely going
towards something more organic in that way, something that can capture
a lot more nuance. [...] there's a lot more that makes a good tool besides
six checkmarks.

As both R1 and R2 suggest, we see how this intended additional ‘nuance’ was at
some point being created not by eliminating categories, but by revisiting them.
A suitable second version of the SMS may have divided the messaging tools in a
set of different groups – R2 calls them ‘tiers’: the first group would include tools
recommended unconditionally, whereas the last group would convey an ‘avoid
at all costs’ message (e.g. for those tools that have no end-to-end encryption
and present clear text on the wire). Within each group the tools would again be
presented alphabetically, and not internally ranked; however, instead of visual
checkmarks, each of them could be accompanied by a paragraph describing
the tool in more detail, specifically aimed at users. As R2 comments, ‘this is
essentially so that we can differentiate [between tools] ... because we realize
now that users are using this guide...’. And R1 suggests that it is also for the
benefit of diverse user groups, with different levels of technical awareness: ‘the goal is for people who are looking on the scheme on a very high level [to] say these tools are the best, these are bad, and there will be a slightly more nuanced explanation for people who really want to read the whole thing.’

Interestingly, the EFF team declared to us in early 2017 that, if the tiered model was going to be used, there were plans to keep the first tier... empty. This had strong implications for the definition of good encryption and security, basically implying that an optimal state has not yet been achieved in the current reality of the secure messaging landscape, and as of yet, a mix of usability and strong security is still an ideal to struggle for. One of our interviewees, for instance, commented that there is currently no tool that provides sufficient levels of insurance against a state-level adversary. Interestingly, the feeling that a ‘perfect tool’ is lacking has found its graphical representation in drawings collected as part of our fieldwork (see Chapter 1, Figures 1.2, 1.3, 1.4). The new SMS would convey the message that nothing is actually 100% secure and make users aware of the fact that there is no ‘perfect tool’, yet it can still be recommended without reservation. R2 gave us practical examples of why the team came to this conclusion, citing WhatsApp’s practices of data sharing with Facebook (its parent company) or Signal’s reliability problems for customers outside the United States.

In passing, the EFF team was defining what, according to them, would ideally be a ‘perfect’ secure messaging tool: end-to-end encrypted, but also providing a satisfactory level of protection from the risks of metadata exploitation, which, as we saw in Chapter 1, is still the core theoretical and practical issue for the developers of secure messaging tools. The emptiness of the tier represented a strong message to begin with, but was of course bound to evolve:

> If a tool got pretty close, and did not provide perfect protection against metadata analysis, we still might put it up in that tier and say look, these people have made a really strong effort [...] But so far, it is going to be empty. Just to emphasize that there's still plenty of distance for tools to go, even the best ones.
Thus, the EFF was not planning to skip its ‘recommender’ function which was at the core of the first version of the SMS; however, as we will see later in more detail, the focus was going to be placed on contexts of use and on the different ‘threat models’ of various user groups. Thus, weaknesses ‘may not be shown in a check-box’.

The graphic and spatial organisation of the second version of SMS was planned to radically differ from 1.0's table. First of all, moving from a table to a list implies a different way of working with the information and undermines the idea of a direct, linear and quantified comparison offered by the table. A list of tiers with nuanced descriptions of different apps and their properties offers room for detailed and qualitative explanations, while tables tend to put different tools on the same surface, thus creating an illusion of commensurability and immediate quantified comparison. As R2 says: ‘It’s [...] definitely not gonna be a table [...] it will be more like a list: here is the first group, here’s the next group, here’s the next group, here’s the group you should never use’.

The idea of ‘filters’ adds a certain degree of user agency to the classification of tools: the lists become modulable as users may set up a criterion that could graphically reorganise data, providing cross-tier comparisons. This offers a different way of classifying the data and ‘making sense of it’, compared to a table. The latter is, as Jack Goody puts it, a graphically organised dataset with a structure that leaves little room for ambiguity, and as such becomes an instrument of governance (Goody 1979).

Another problem posed by the grid format, that the new version of the SMS sought to address, was the projected equivalence of the different criteria, from the open-source release of the code to its audit and the type of encryption. The ‘checklist’ and ‘points’ system created the impression of an artificial equality between these criteria, and therefore led to the idea that one can ‘quantify’ the security of a given tool by counting points. In fact, the presence of some criteria rather than others, or the degree to which they are implemented, may result in different impacts on security and privacy, in particular for users in high-risk contexts:

> [If you were] someone who does not know anything about crypto or security, you would look at this scorecard and would say, any two tools that have, say, five out of seven checkmarks are probably about the same [while] if...
one of those tools actually had end 2 end encryption and the other did not, even though they both had code audit or the code was available, or things like that, their security obviously isn't the same. [The SMS 1.0] artificially made the apps that were definitely not secure in the same way look secure. And we were worried it was putting particular users whose safety depends on... you know users in Iraq or in Syria, in Egypt, where their security of their messages actually affects their safety.

The EFF team also realised that some developers and firms proposing secure messaging tools had, while presenting their tools, ‘bent’ the 1.0 grid to their own advantage – more precisely, they had presented a high conformity to the SMS as a label of legitimacy. Again, R2 emphasises that this was a problem particularly in those cases when users lack the technical background or expertise to build their own hierarchy of the criteria’s relative importance, according to their needs or ‘threat model’ (see Chapter 1).

In 2017, a piece of research on user understanding of the SMS, authored by Ruba Abu-Salma, Joe Bonneau and other researchers with the collaboration of University College London, showed that indeed, users seem to have misunderstood the 1.0 scorecard in several respects. Four out of seven criteria raised issues: ‘participants did not appreciate the difference between point-to-point and e2e encryption and did not comprehend forward secrecy or fingerprint verification’ (Abu-Salma et al. 2017b), while the other three properties (documentation, open-source code and security audits) ‘were considered to be negative security properties, with users believing security requires obscurity’. Thus, the assessment concluded, ‘there is a gap not only between users’ understanding of secure communication tools and the technical reality, but also a gap between real users and how the security research community imagines them’ (ibid.).

**'Not everyone needs a bunker'! From a tool- to a context-centred approach**

The additional expertise needed by the user to understand the difference between various criteria and their importance emerged as a crucial flaw of the first version of the grid. One of the keys for a ‘new and improved’ SMS, thus
seemed to be the fact of taking user knowledge seriously, as a cornerstone of
the categorisation: for it to be meaningful, users needed to identify and analyse
their respective threat model, i.e. identify, enumerate and prioritise potential
threats in their digital environment. R3 remarked that this is one of the core
objectives of EFF in several of its projects beyond the revision of the SMS, and
noted that there are no direct tools to indicate what threat model one has, but
users need to uncover the right indicators in their specific contexts of action:

We're not answering what someone's threat model is, we just help guide them in their direction of what to read. We can say like journalists might have good secure communication tools that they might wanna protect their data, but we can't say how much of a threat any journalists are under because different journalists have different threats.

Furthermore, R2 pointed out that the same wording used to identify a particular
threat might have very different meanings or implications depending on the
profile of the user who utters it and on the geopolitical context she operates in:
‘there’s still a difference between “I am worried of a state-level actor in Syria”
versus “I am worried of a state-level actor in Iran” versus China versus US’. In
this regard, the more ‘qualitative’, descriptive nature of the new SMS should be
useful to trigger the right reflexes.

In the absence of a universally appropriate application, the new SMS should
take the diversity of the users – and the corresponding diversity of their threat
models – as a starting point. R2 again resorted to specific case-examples to illus-
trate this point, citing Ukrainian war correspondents and ‘ hipster San-Francisco
wealthy middle-class people’ as opposites in terms of needing to worry about
the relationship between their safety and the security of their messages. Helping
individuals to trace their profile as Internet users, and the different components
of their online communication practices, would be a first step towards identify-
ing the threat model that best corresponds to them:

Not everyone has to put on a tin foil hat and create an emergency bunker.

Lots of people do, but not everybody. I think that would be great to have an
[ideally secure] app but since it's not there I think it's useful to tailor things, tailor the threat model.

If for the user the choice of a strong secure messaging tool is in this vision strictly linked to the understanding of his or her threat model, for its part the EFF acknowledges that just as there is no universally appropriate application, the same applies to the definition of what constitutes ‘good’ encryption – ‘good’ security and privacy. Beyond the strength of specific technical components, the quality of being ‘secure’ and ‘private’ extends to the appreciation of the geographical and political situation, of the user’s knowledge and expertise… of whether privacy and security are or not a matter of physical and emotional integrity, which can only be contextually defined and linked to a particular threat model. A high-quality secure messaging tool may not necessarily always be the one that provides the greatest privacy, but the one that empowers users to achieve precisely the level of privacy they need.

## Comparing with other categorisation systems

The efforts to revise the SMS could not, for the EFF team, do without a comparison with other categorisation systems. On one hand, the new version of the SMS would interact with the Surveillance Self-Defense Guide, developed by the EFF itself and destined for the purpose of ‘defending yourself and your friends from surveillance by using secure technology and developing careful practices’.¹⁶ Indeed, the contextual approach to users’ needs and threat models appears to be dominant in this project: in stark contrast to the technical properties-based criteria of the first SMS, on the guide’s home page, a number of ‘buttons’ introduce the reader to different paths of privacy and security protection depending on… user profiles and ‘ideal-types’ (Figure 5.3). The revised SMS should have partaken in this shift.

According to R3, this approach based on facilitation, induction and personalisation is informing more broadly the recent EFF efforts, and goes back to identifying the right level of relative security for the right context:
<figure><img src="image_19.png" /><figcaption>**FIG. 5.3** Sample of ‘user paths’ on the SSD home page as of early 2017. These ‘user profiles’ have as of 2019 been turned into a ‘Security Scenarios’ menu (https://ssd.eff.org/en)</figcaption></figure>

We don't distinguish threat models; we give tools to help users figure out what are their threat models. [...] I still would not say we were putting an answer to the question out there. The key to the guide that we've created is that we want people to start with understanding their own personal situation.

The EFF was also looking at categorisation systems in the same field produced by other actors – acknowledging that SMS 1.0 has been, in turn, an inspiration for some of them and that there seems to be a need, generally identified in the field, for tools to provide guidance in the increasingly complex landscape of secure messaging.¹⁷ R1 engaged in dialogue with several organisations which had the same kind of categorisation projects ongoing or were considering establishing one. A few of these organisations explicitly acknowledged that they were drawing ideas and concepts from the first version of the SMS, but re-elaborating it, which EFF considered a positive thing. Both R1 and R2 refer in particular to the similar effort by Amnesty International in 2016,¹⁸ and while R1 acknowledges that
they were really trying to produce something very simple and consumer-
based and I think they did that, their report was much easier to digest for
the general public', R2 mentions how 'I feel they suffer a lot from the same
problem that Scorecard had, which is they [...] rely on a single number, they
gave this score, like 90.5 points out of a 100 [and] you can't reduce security
down to a single number.

The alternative, user-centred approach arose not only as a result of internal reflec-
tions on the first version of SMS, but also in relation to how parallel categorisa-
tion attempts were performed by other actors promoting online civil liberties.
This includes informational security trainers and their recent pedagogical shift
from tools to threat model evaluation, as described in Chapter 1.

*Conformity to criteria: Evidence-seeking, evidence-giving*

A final set of evolutions was meant to move beyond the building of the cat-
egorisation system itself. It aimed to question how EFF would request proof
of the different secure messaging tools' conformity to their guidance, and how
this evidence would subsequently be provided by the developers of the tools,
as well as the encryption/security community at large. Indeed, one of the early
criticisms of the first SMS did not have to do with the format of the grid, but
concerned the opacity of the ways in which its 'binary' recommendations were
evidence-supported.

In SMS 1.0, ‘green lights’ had sometimes been awarded for specific criteria
as a result of the private correspondence between R1 and the developers, says
R2: ‘He would just email [...] sometimes he knew who was the developer but
most cases it was just like contact @...’. The subsequent version of the SMS
would thus adopt a more transparent approach and encourage display of public
evidence from the developers, the lack of which may be a deal-breaker:

This time around we are not going to accept as proof of any criteria any
private correspondence. If an app wants to get credit for something, it has
to publicly post it somewhere. I mean, we may be contacting developers to
encourage them to publicly post it. [...] we don't want to have to say, 'well, we talked to them'. We want to say they are publicly committed to it. (R2)

In particular, one of the criteria that had raised more objections in terms the evidence provided was the review of the code – a developer, contributing to the previously-mentioned SMS-focused Hacker News discussion thread, asked: ‘What does “security design properly documented” even mean?’. The EFF did not have sufficient resources to review the code line by line, and for several of the tools the code was not available, which is why the ‘external audit’ criterion was added. The lack of resources to dedicate to this task continued to be a problem, one more reason why, in the second phase, the EFF meant to concentrate on what app developers made public via their official communication channels. In parallel, the criterion calling for an independent audit – which, as we recall, had elicited a lot of internal methodological reflection since the beginning – was no longer meant to have a place in the second version of the SMS, once again because of evidence-seeking requirements and their material and human costs. As R1 pointed out, ‘the cost of really doing a crypto audit of a tool is really high. The audit of 40 tools would have taken an entire year for me. So we just did not have the resources’. Interestingly – and while he agrees that the criterion needs to be dropped as such – R2 points out that several companies do their own audits, and the fact that they keep the results private does not necessarily affect their quality:

> There are companies like Apple or Facebook [...] it's almost certain they're doing an audit with an internal team so they will not release it publicly. It does not necessarily mean that the internal team did not do a good job. [...]
> 
> For that reason we feel like the whole audit category does not do a lot. But we are going to still include if the code is open for an independent review because we think that's important [for some threat models].

Finally, to support the arguments provided in the new SMS, the EFF team expressed the wish to build on the competencies of the encryption communities of practice – cryptographers, professors, people in industry and digital
security trainers – in order to get feedback about whether they possessed enough
information about a particular tool, and whether the available information was
correct. The EFF team anticipates that the search for feedback will be ongoing,
to avoid falling into the same trap that had led commentators to wonder why
the making of the first SMS had seemingly been a mostly ‘internal’ matter for
EFF¹⁹ and also to be able to react promptly to important changes in the tools:
‘We try to make it clear that we’re keeping the door open to feedback after we
publish it, for anyone we did not get a chance to talk to before we published it.
We can’t get feedback from everybody before it goes live’. As tools evolve, what
constitutes ‘good’ security evolves, or may evolve, as well.

CONCLUSIONS: SOMETIMES NARRATIVES ARE THE BEST
CATEGORIES

Using the Electronic Frontier Foundation's prominent attempts at building a grid or guide to assess secure messaging tools, this chapter has sought to examine the role of categorisation and classification in defining 'good' encryption, privacy, security and secure messaging. In doing so, it has analysed how, by challenging, re-examining and re-shaping the categories that are meaningful to define the quality of secure messaging tools, the EFF has sparked a 'global crypto discussion'²⁰ that currently contributes to shape what constitutes 'good' security and privacy in the field of encrypted messaging.

Indeed, on one hand, the EFF's activities, epitomised by the SMS and its
revisions, seem to contribute to the 'opportunistic turn' in encryption (IETF
2014) that gained momentum in 2014 after the Snowden revelations, and con-
sists in a progressive move of the crypto community towards making encryp-
tion 'seamless', with almost no efforts required on the part of users. In terms of
design choices, this entails a 'blackboxing' of quite a few operations that used
to be visible to users and that needed to be actively controlled by them (e.g. key
exchange and verification, or the choice of encrypted/unencrypted status etc.).
The opportunistic turn calls for 'encryption by design', and constructs a new
user profile, one who 'does not have to' have any specific knowledge about cryp-
tographic concepts and does not have to undertake any additional operations
to guarantee a secure communication. That shift may also be explained by the
growing popularity of ‘usable crypto’ that undermines experts’ monopoly on
encryption and makes easy end-to-end encryption accessible outside of the
tech-savvy user groups, where users used to be at the same time designers,
developers and cryptographers.

However, while calling upon developers for improved usability – demanding that the technical crypto community make some properties, such as key verification, easy for users and independent from user agency – the EFF also puts users at the core of its attempt to develop a better ‘guiding system’, and in doing so, entrusts them with an important decision-making responsibility. To put it in R2’s words, ‘[The aim] is still to push the developers to improve but we realise that people are using it to make choices, so now the idea is [to do this,] instead of just showing the developers here’s what you have to do’. As it is often the case with categorisation and classification systems, the SMS was re-appropriated by the different actors in the community of practice, beyond the intentions of its creators – and several users in particular have relied on it heavily. Attempts at an evolved SMS intended to take this into account to a greater extent; but within the new paradigm that guided attempts to move beyond the SMS 1.0, there is an understanding that users have to question their threat models, increase their awareness of them, and have to know how to make technological choices according to their particular situation – a tool, from this perspective, is ‘good’ if pertinent to the context of use. This paradigm shift is also experienced and reflected upon by the trainers, organisers of cryptoparties and informational security seminars whom we have interviewed in different countries.

The reader may wonder at this point whether there is an (ongoing) epilogue
to this story, given the fieldwork for this particular strand of our research ended
in 2017. The answer is both that there is continuity with our conclusions above,
and at the same time, things have moved in a slightly surprising direction. In
March 2018, Nate Cardozo, Gennie Gebhart and Erica Portnoy of EFF published
a piece with a provocative title: ‘Secure Messaging? More Like a Secure Mess’
and an equally provocative first sentence: ‘There is no such thing as a perfect
or one-size-fits-all messaging app’ (Cardozo et al. 2018). As we kept on read-
ing the article, we realised that we were in fact looking at the latest, and likely
the final, iteration of the SMS – one that in describing the intention to create a ‘series’, reads like a selection of articles, all attempts at schematisations and categorisations gone, including the ‘tiers’ organisation that our interviews had unveiled as the EFF’s intended next step:

For users, a messenger that is reasonable for one person could be dangerous for another. And for developers, there is no single correct way to balance security features, usability, and the countless other variables (...) we realized that the ‘scorecard’ format dangerously oversimplified the complex question of how various messengers stack up from a security perspective. With this in mind, we archived the original scorecard, warned people to not rely on it, and went back to the drawing board. (...) we concluded it wasn’t possible for us to clearly describe the security features of many popular messaging apps, in a consistent and complete way, while considering the varied situations and security concerns of our audience (...) So we have decided to take a step back and share what we have learned from this process: (this series will) dive into all the ways we see this playing out, from the complexity of making and interpreting personal recommendations to the lack of consensus on technical and policy standards.

For users, we hope this series will help in developing an understanding of secure messaging that is deeper than a simple recommendation. This can be more frustrating and takes more time than giving a one-and-done list of tools to use or avoid, but we think it is worth it. For developers, product managers, academics, and other professionals working on secure messaging, we hope this series will clarify EFF’s current thinking on secure messaging and invite further conversation (Cardozo et al. 2018).²¹

Ultimately, the EFF’s conclusion – after, as Cardozo and his colleagues themselves point out, ‘several years of feedback and a lengthy user study’ – can be understood as the celebration of the ‘relational’ concept of risk we introduced in Chapter 1, and as a consequence, of the impossibility, when it comes to secure messaging, of a classical categorisation system including lists, schemas, regroupings, bullet points, tables, columns and rows. The soundness and ‘goodness’
of privacy and security protection in the field of secure messaging cannot be accounted for in a system intended to provide a set of possible answers for *all* possible readers – even if categories were expressed as open-ended questions aimed at personalising feedback, instead of red crosses versus green dots. A similar approach has been taken by the Citizen Lab's Security Planner²² project, an interactive online digital security guide that gives a personalised and detailed 'action plan' including recommendations on security measures and tools based on users' responses to a set of questions.

The epilogue of the EFF's experimentation first with a scorecard, then with a guide, brings us to the conclusion that our fieldwork on the transition from the first to the second version had already unveiled: if a tool is good when it is pertinent for the user(s) and their social, geographical and political context of use, the best categories cannot possibly be anything else than narratives – narratives that do not prescribe, but inspire reflection on who a person is and what they want to do, who their adversary is, and what they want their communicative act to be. For some things and some times, suggests the EFF, open questions and narratives may be the best categories – and a field such as encrypted messaging today, which ‘is hard to get right – and [...] even harder to tell if someone else has gotten it right’ (Cardozo et al. 2018), is very likely to be one of those things and times.

## NOTES

<footnote n="1">1 A previous version of this chapter was published as Musiani, F. and K. Ermoshina, ‘What is a Good Secure Messaging Tool? The EFF Secure Messaging Scorecard and the Shaping of Digital (Usable) Security’, *Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture*, 12.3 (2017), 51–71 <http://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.265>. Sections are reproduced and adapted here under a CC-BY 4.0 license. The paper was also presented and discussed at the annual conference of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) in Cartagena de las Indias, Colombia, on 19 July 2017.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 https://www.eff.org/node/82654.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 See e.g. the discussion of the code audit criterion at Peter Eckersley, ‘What makes a good security audit?’, EFF Deeplinks, 8 November 2014, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/what-makes-good-security-audit, which will be addressed in more detail later in the chapter.</footnote>
4 https://www.eff.org/secure-messaging-scorecard.

5 https://www.eff.org/node/82654. This webpage, introducing SMS v1, is now preserved 'for purely historical reasons' on the EFF website. Citations in this section are from a version of this page that was online at the time of our fieldwork (2016–2017) unless otherwise noted.

6 We will return to them in more detail below.

7 http://cve.mitre.org/cve.

8 https://www.eff.org/node/82654.

9 Discussion thread on Hacker News, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10526242.

10 Formerly at https://www.eff.org/secure-messaging-scorecard, which was taken offline during 2018.

11 https://www.eff.org/node/82654: ‘you should not use this scorecard to evaluate the security of any of the listed tools’.

12 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10526242. Citations in this paragraph are from this thread unless otherwise noted.

13 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/08/recap-first-eff-cup-workshop.

14 See also https://www.eff.org/node/82654: ‘the results in the scorecard below should not be read as endorsements of individual tools or guarantees of their security; they are merely indications that the projects are on the right track’

15 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10526242.

16 https://ssd.eff.org/en.

17 This issue had also been brought up in the Hacker News SMS-related thread: ‘Isn’t it a bit strange, that there is no such thing as that scoreboard produced by an international group of universities and industry experts, with a transparent documentation of the review process and plenty of room for discussion of different paradigms? (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10526242).

18 https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2016/10/which-messaging-apps-best-protect-your-privacy.

19 See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10526242: ‘Why didn’t they consult any named outside experts? They could have gotten the help if they needed it; instead, they developed this program in secret and launched it all at once’.

20 Ibid.

21 We license this text from the EFF website under a CC-BY license: https://www.eff.org/copyright.

22 https://securityplanner.org.
CONCLUSIONS: ENCRYPTED
COMMUNICATIONS AS A SITE
OF SOCIAL, POLITICAL AND
TECHNICAL CONTROVERSY

WE NOW CONCLUDE THIS JOURNEY AMONG EXPERIMENTS IN 'CONCEALING
for freedom'. During this journey, we have explored the choices made in technol-
ogy and governance that lead to both a variety of configurations of encrypted
tools and to a diversity of intended publics and action repertoires (Tilly 1985)
for these tools. We have also witnessed the attempts to categorise and make
sense of the 'mess of messengers' that seek to respond to the challenges associ-
ated with the increasing variety and complexity of the field.

In the final pages of this book, we seek to draw some conclusions about
encrypted communications as a site of social, political and technical contro-
versy today. Encrypted messaging tools remain at the centre of a powerful
double narrative, with on the one hand a strong positive discourse around
empowerment and better protection of fundamental civil liberties and, on the
other, an equally strong critical discourse shaped by allegations concerning
the technology's links to (and fostering of) terrorism. Furthermore, we can
see how there are two 'turns' in the ecosystem of online communication: the
cryptographic turn, that has seen Internet companies implement a number of
cryptography-based organisational and technical responses aimed at restoring
user trust in their cloud-based services, and the 'opportunistic turn', a progres-
sive move by the crypto community towards making encryption seamless and
requiring almost no effort from users to actively control most of the messaging
tool's operations.
Issues related to encryption and its adoption in messaging systems inextri-
cably entangle with issues of standardisation (both formal and informal), the
political economy of software development and adoption, and the consequences
of choices about technical architectures. This concluding chapter will offer some
reflections on these different aspects as informed by our fieldwork and will
then tie the different ways in which political effects can be achieved through
technological choices to broader contemporary political concerns related to
privacy, in particular, how they can interact with recent supra-national legal
instruments such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Finally,
we will comment on the implications of our study and of cognate research for
the development of social studies of encryption and for its interactions with
Internet governance research, in particular work inspired by STS.

INTERNET RIGHTS AND FREEDOMS ‘BY ARCHITECTURE’

Throughout its chapters and its various stories about the development and use
of encrypted messaging systems, this book has addressed the question of the
relationship between different kinds of technological architecture – most notably
those that support the concealing of metadata, data or communications – and
Internet freedoms and fundamental rights.

The relationship between human rights and Internet protocols is starting to
become an issue in a few arenas, both political and technical; for example, the
IRTF and its Human Rights Protocol Considerations research group (which will
be further discussed below). As Stéphane Bortzmeyer (2019) aptly contends,
the idea progressively taking hold in such arenas is that

the Internet is not just an object of consumption, that the customer would
only want to be fast, cheap, reliable, as it would a car or the electrical grid.
We do business, politics, we talk, we work, we get distracted, we date: The
Internet is not a tool that we use, it is a space where our activities unfold.

It is, to paraphrase Carl Schmitt (2003), the *nomos* of the twenty-first century,
a normative universe where fundamental rights, as constrained or enabled by
the platforms and protocols of the Internet, are in many cases just as important
for people as the guarantees provided by governments.

The Internet as a multifaceted public space intersects with a pre-existing human rights framework. Human rights are formalised in texts such as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), where they are claimed to be universal, indivisible and inalienable. Despite such claims, it is clear that human rights are not absolute, as they may be in conflict with one another – in fact, they usually are. For example, the right to freedom of expression may conflict with the right not to be insulted or harassed, and freedom of expression may conflict with the right to privacy, if we want to prevent the publication of personal data. Historically, it has been the task of the legal system to determine the balance between such rights. In the networked age, the question is whether the technical space of the Internet, including its rules, limits and capabilities, has an influence on human rights, or whether it transforms human rights; and, if the latter, what concrete policy measures are needed as a consequence?

In 2012, the co-inventor of the Internet and Google evangelist Vint Cerf put forward the proposition that ‘Internet access is not a human right’, arguing that ‘technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself’, as a human right ‘must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience’ and so ‘it is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things’ (Cerf 2012). Nonetheless, some countries have made Internet access a basic right – Finland, for example – and this sentiment has been echoed by other entities, such as, for example, the Constitutional Council in France. Relatedly, it has also been argued that, while Internet access per se may not be a human right, the empowerment such access can provide probably is. As Tim Berners-Lee and Harry Halpin point out, considering the ability to access a particular technical infrastructure as a human right may be less important than defining as a new kind of right the ensemble of social capabilities that the Internet engenders (Berners-Lee and Halpin 2012).

Thus, Internet rights and freedoms may be promoted or enforced ‘by archi-
tecture’, including by ‘technology-embedded’ proposals around network neu-
trality and encryption. Data protection as an Internet right extends the notion
of privacy to the digital age, fundamentally reshapes it and puts it into tension
with new, similarly transformed networked forms of the right to free expres-
sion. This book has unveiled different ways in which technical developments of
encrypted secure messaging systems, and of the associated governance models,
construct Internet rights and freedoms, and are then in return shaped by them.
The makers of ‘concealing for freedom’ technologies, their users and their
regulators, operate within arenas of social, political and technical controversy
ranging from standardisation and political economy of software development
to choices of technical architecture and business models. The following pages
draw conclusions about each of these aspects.

*On (de-)centralisation: Choices of architecture as (a substitute for) politics*

This book has provided thorough empirical evidence that, in the field of secure
messaging as in other fields of protocol and software development, the choice of
more or less centralised technical architectures is a context-based compromise,
and not the result of choices between abstract models that might have intrinsi-
cally better or worse qualities. Decentralised architectures are a suitable solution
in particular situations; but just as centralised architectures can, in some cases,
have useful and rights-preserving qualities and, in others, be highly problematic,
decentralised architectures are not always the ideal solution. The case studies
we have examined in Chapters 2 to 4 illustrate, via concrete cases, the extent to
which technical decisions contribute to enacting particular configurations of
governance and repertoires of action.

Many Internet protocols have a client/server architecture. This means that
the machines that communicate are not equivalent. On one side is a server,
permanently on and waiting for connections, and on the other is a client, who
connects when it has something to ask. This is a logical mode of operation when
the two communicating parties are distinct, which is the case on the Web: when
visiting a website, a user is a reader, and the entity which manages the website
produces the content to be read. Yet not all uses of the Internet fit into this
model. Sometimes one wants to exchange messages with an acquaintance. The
communication, in this case, is not reader-to-writer, one-way, but peer-to-peer.
In this case, the machines of two humans communicate directly, something the Internet allows via peer-to-peer architecture.

So why go through an intermediary when it is not always strictly necessary? Usually, as Chapters 2 and 3 in particular have shown, it is because the intermediary serves a variety of purposes, that range from technical functioning and optimisation to business model, and to organisational/governance forms providing different extents of control. An example is the storage of messages in the case where the correspondent is absent, and their machine off. The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), which is the basis of the sending and relaying functions in email services, does not provide for messages to be sent directly from Alice's machine to Bob's. Alice's software sends the message to an SMTP server, which then transmits it to the SMTP server that Bob uses, which will then retrieve it via yet another protocol, probably the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP). The consequence of this architecture is that now, Alice and Bob depend on third parties, the managers of their respective SMTP servers. These managers can stop the service, limit it, block some messages (the fight against spam always causes collateral damage), and, if Alice and Bob do not use encrypted email protocols, read what passes through their servers. In practice, this may not happen, but the possibility exists, and it is technically very simple to archive all the messages being transmitted.

Since passing through an intermediate server has consequences, the question inevitably arises: which server to use? A personal machine that we install and manage ourselves, which is the closest a user can get to complete decentralisation? A personal machine run by a friend who knows and takes care of everything? A server or a cluster of servers run by a local collective, as in federated networks? Servers run by actors that mostly operate on centralised architectures, such as a public body, or a Silicon Valley platform like Gmail that is now able to extract information from a sizable portion of the world's email? The choice is far from obvious, both for developers when they are faced with technical choices, and for users who have to pick one or two communication tools out of many, based on often obscure criteria.

From the point of view of privacy and freedom of expression, centralised architectures are frequently criticised for posing the greatest threats. However,
as Chapter 1 has shown, it is not always possible to individualise these problems: even if one does not use Gmail, others using Gmail may leak the contacts being made to your non-Gmail email to Google.

Still, in principle any third party that controls a server has the ability to abuse
its power, and machines that are managed by a particular individual, local com-
pany or even public administration in federated networks may not, ultimately, be
safer than the giant centralised actors of Silicon Valley, as they will simply have
fewer resources to solve security and privacy-related issues. A machine run by
a well-intentioned but overworked and not necessarily competent amateur can
present high risks, not because the amateur is untrustworthy, but because it can
be relatively easy to successfully attack the system. At the same time, it should
be pointed out that professional servers are not necessarily safer: a number of
recent hacks of very large companies have shown that they ultimately present
perhaps larger targets. Servers managed by public bodies are an option, but even
an administration that is well-meaning at a particular point in time may eventu-
ally evolve into one that violates rights and liberties. In this regard, federated
systems, which allow servers to be easily interchanged, have some benefits in
terms of sustainability. For example, Mastodon, the decentralised microblog-
ging service (à la Twitter), is made up of hundreds of independently managed
servers, some of which are administered by an individual (thus, their future is
uncertain if this individual abandons this role), some by associations and yet
others by companies of different sizes.

What are the implications of decentralised and peer-to-peer architectures for Internet rights and freedoms? First, as we have seen in Chapter 4, we should recall that these terms do not designate a particular protocol, but a family of highly diverse protocols. The most well-known peer-to-peer application in recent Internet history has been for the exchange of media files (e.g. music, video), but peer-to-peer is a very general architecture. And despite being accompanied by a rhetoric of openness and freedom, decentralised architectures also have their problems from the standpoint of Internet rights and freedoms. In the era of Google and Facebook as dominant, centralised, totalising platforms that seek to exert control over all user interactions, it has been easy to often present peer-to-peer as the ideal solution to all problems, including censorship. But as this
book has shown in its analysis of the field of secure messaging, the situation is
far more complicated than that.

First, peer-to-peer networks have no central certification authority for con-
tent; thus, they are vulnerable to various forms of attacks, ranging from 'fake data'
to 'fake users'. It should be remembered that at one time, rights-holders circulated
fake MP3s on peer-to-peer networks, with promising names and disappointing
content, that lured users and eventually led them to be identified by their act of
downloading. An attacker can also relatively easily otherwise corrupt the data
being shared, or at the very least the routing that leads to it. Furthermore, in
terms of net neutrality, because the peer-to-peer protocols that account for a
good deal of Internet traffic are often identifiable within a particular network,
an ISP may be tempted to limit their traffic. Many peer-to-peer protocols do
not hide the IP address of users; for example, in the popular peer-to-peer file
sharing client BitTorrent, if you find a peer who has the file you are interested in,
and you contact them, this peer will learn your IP address (unless you disguise
your IP address by using a VPN). This can be used by rights-holding individuals
or organisations as a basis for issuing threatening letters or for initiating legal
proceedings, as it has been the case with the HADOPI¹ in France (Arnold et
al. 2014). There are peer-to-peer networks that deploy protection against this
leak of personal information, such as Freenet, but they remain rarely used by
the public at large.

Another danger specific to peer-to-peer networks is ‘fake users’, also called
Sybil attacks: i.e. if verifying an identity can be done without needing some-
thing expensive or difficult to obtain, nothing prevents an attacker from creat-
ing millions of identities and thus subverting systems. It is in order to combat
this type of attack that different systems and platforms have resorted to other
ways of verifying identity. Bitcoin uses ‘proof of work’, a form of cryptographic
proof in which one party to a transaction proves to the other parties that a
particular amount of computational resources has been dedicated to a specific
objective. Organisations like the CAcert certification authority (Tänzer 2014),
or informal groups like users of the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption
program, use certifications created during physical meetings, which include
verifying a user’s national identity documents. There is currently no general
solution to the problems of Sybil attacks, especially if any solution is required
to be both ecologically sustainable – which is not the case of the proof of work
mechanism – and fully peer-to-peer – which is not the case for conventional
enrolment systems, as they require a privileged actor to approve a participant’s
entry. Solutions based on social connections, such as the one proposed by PGP,
pose problems to privacy, since they expose the social graph of the participants –
the list of their correspondents. In this field of alternative methods for identity
verification, experiments aimed at allowing gossip in social networks to help
verify identity,² while remaining privacy-preserving, are on the way;³ but the
road is far from linear.

As the most recent generation of secure messaging tools develops, and
more broadly, the blockchain takes hold as an often more politically acceptable
decentralised technology – even as we are learning more and more about its
governance and technical flaws – the relationship between different architectural
models for networking and communication technologies, the choices made
and the roads not taken, are likely to remain a controversial issue. Attempts to
deploy decentralised technologies and communities within particular territories
are currently being piloted.⁴ More traditionally political arenas are involved in
the decentralisation debate: in early 2019, declarations of intention by political
officials in several European countries indicated an intention to actively favour
decentralised technologies, blockchain in particular, via legislation. French
President Emmanuel Macron, for example, referred to blockchain as a possible
way to bring transparency and traceability into the agricultural industry to ensure
better quality, and argued that Europe should adopt a ‘homogeneous policy’ in
this regard. Within Europe at least, it is therefore likely that further proposals
to use blockchain or decentralised technologies for such purposes will see the
light in the coming months and years.

The success of the blockchain is perhaps still greater in research projects
and imaginaries of intermediary-less futures than in fully working applications,
and we can recognise, as in previous ‘expectation cycles’ related to distributed
architectures and a number of other technologies (see e.g. Borup et al. 2006;
Brown and Michael 2003), interactions between both potential and hype. Yet,
the blockchain and its myriad variants have some specific features that will be
very interesting to observe in the coming years. In particular, it seems to be the first decentralised networking technology to be widely accepted — 'celebrated' would be more accurate — by national and supra-national institutions, despite its first widespread application, Bitcoin, being born with the explicitly stated goal of making each and every institution obsolete, and despite its birth, development and functionality being subject to several controversies (Musiani and Méadel 2016).

Thanks to the role that local and distributed technologies have played, relying on networks such as TOR, in rallying and organising social movements and grassroots resistance tactics, decentralised architectures are increasingly seen as technologies of empowerment and liberation. Yet they do not escape a powerful double narrative, fuelled by previous narratives depicting peer-to-peer as an allegedly ‘empowering-yet-illegal’ technology. On the one hand, the discourse around empowerment and better protection of fundamental civil liberties is very strong; on the other hand, several projects that have sought to merge decentralisation and encryption to improve protection against surveillance have needed to defend themselves from allegations of use by terrorists and other unsavoury publics (a defence some projects are technically unable to mount).

This dialectic is taking place in the broader context of discussions about civil liberties and governance by infrastructure (Musiani et al. 2016), some of them particularly related to encryption (or the breaking of it), such as the Apple vs FBI case or WhatsApp proposing, since April 2016, encryption by default (Schulze 2017). Indeed, both the (re-)distribution and the (re-)decentralisation of networks are strictly linked – much more so than a few years ago, and in particular after the Snowden revelations – to discussions of surveillance and privacy, and find themselves frequently associated with discussions about encryption, and its practical implementations. The next section will discuss this relationship and its challenges.

ON ENCRYPTION: STRATEGIES OF CONCEALMENT AS
INTEGRITY (AND POWER) TOOLS

As we have seen throughout the book, encryption is a controversial issue. As the case studies unfolded, we could see how the different developer teams – and,
often, the users of the systems they develop – cope with the fact that debates over encryption policy are framed as pitting security at the cost of civil liberties against new technological freedoms that may pose security risks. While technologists, including several developers and security trainers interviewed for this book, hold that without encryption the right to privacy remains purely theoretical given the ease of spying on digital communications, encryption is frequently framed in political debates as a mechanism that allows criminals to conceal the content of their communications from the judicial system and police.

Our research allows us to point out several ways in which this debate should be nuanced, as we have examined the ‘making of’ encryption and its interplay with Internet rights and freedoms. We have observed how cryptography is not only used to conceal information, i.e. to make data confidential, but also to provide checks on the integrity and authentication of data, even data that is public. For example, in order to check that data has not been modified either by accident or with ill-intent, we have seen hash functions – functions that shrink data to a small code that can be checked independently – being used to check the integrity of the data. We have also seen cryptographic techniques being put to use with both private secrets, called private keys, that can work with public information, and public keys, to both authenticate as well as encrypt data. With public keys and hash functions, digital signatures can be created to make sure that we know the identity of the entity that originates particular data. This approach, widely used in secure messaging, is useful in a variety of scenarios, including e-Signature schemes that can help reduce bureaucracy or to prevent the spread of false information. Thus comes the dilemma that, in the field of secure messaging, has been exemplified by the FBI vs Apple case (Schulze 2017): if a government implements a policy to reduce the scope of encryption so that its police or intelligence services can ‘read’ digital messages, there is a clear danger that the government would accidentally prevent other uses of encryption that would damage the ability of users to place any trust in data circulation and processing by third parties, with wide-ranging negative economic consequences.

For this reason, and acknowledging that developer teams’ respective strategies in terms of architectural choice or standardisation greatly vary, we can
recognise a common trend in the different stories of development we have examined: strong resistance to making the encryption of data illegal, for any reason. Actors in the secure messaging field share the belief that cryptography needs to be legal as digital technologies not only increase the possibilities of surveillance, but they do so in a fundamentally asymmetric manner that is incompatible with democracy (see also Bortzmeyer 2019); platforms gather a lot of information about us, but these platforms are opaque to citizens, and the same issue holds true of various state intelligence agencies; furthermore, this data processing happens en masse.

Our observation of the development processes of secure messaging tools as ‘situated practices’ reveals the limits of presenting encryption primarily as a mechanism that will prevent states and police forces from conducting their investigations properly. As we followed developers in their endeavours, we could see that for them, end-to-end encryption – where the endpoints are the users, and no entity in the middle has the ability to decrypt the message – actually, and partially, restores the social norms around communication that were expected prior to the advent of digital communication, so that messages are clearly given to be from a particular sender and can only be read by a particular recipient, with interference to the message being detectable.

With a revival post-Snowden (e.g. Barr 2016), but having its roots in a long-standing academic and political debates (Rivest 1998; Soghoian 2010), one heavily debated, controversial policy option concerning encryption has been and is its ‘selective weakening’ by allowing both the use of encryption and its possible breaking in specific cases – for example, in case of investigation of a case of terrorism, the idea of a ‘backdoor’ to allow decryption of encrypted messages. From the standpoint of technologists, this arrangement is highly problematic as, regardless of the choice of technical architecture, the mathematical algorithms that form the core of encryption cannot work only in some cases, but not in others: either they make it possible for data to be accessed by anyone who has the key, or they have a flaw, which is exploitable by anyone who is aware of it – an argument made, most prominently, by the *Keys Under Doormats* report (Abelson et al. 2015). In proposals for ‘backdoors’, one decryption key would be the legitimate receiver’s key, but another key would exist, controlling
a ‘middlebox’ that decrypts the message and re-encrypts it to the intended recipient. This key is considered to be under ‘key escrow’, which means stored by a third party such as the government, and perhaps only available in special circumstances. However, such a solution would, for clear enough reasons, not work in open-source and free software projects (including those examined in Chapters 3 and 4), where the review of any code would show the backdoor. It would be more realistic in contexts such as those described in Chapter 2, where the user does not have control over the software she is using, and the software she is given may include the backdoor from the start.

As one of the developers we interviewed pointed out, though, ‘Obviously, any real threat to the state will not use the latter tools, but [will instead] search for software without backdoors. But this method can work with the honest citizen who, unlike the terrorist, trusts proprietary software, and who communicate with each other through Silicon Valley platforms’. Thus, from the standpoint of this developer and others among our interviewees, the purpose of anti-encryption campaigns for ‘backdoors’ is not, or not primarily, about finding solutions allowing authorities to decrypt for anti-terrorism purposes, but a way to pressure Silicon Valley and other technical actors to include backdoors in their communication software, in order to enable and/or sustain systems of mass surveillance.⁵ In response to this scenario, the European Commission has recognised in its recent cybersecurity strategy (European Commission 2017) that encryption allows fundamental freedoms to be exercised, and digital freedoms organisations such as European Digital Rights (EDRi) have argued that as such, encryption should be recognised as a tool for countering the arbitrariness of state governments and dominant private actors (EDRi 2017).

Developers of the variety of secure messaging systems examined in this book are coping with several levels of complexity. Their use of modern cryptography and, most often, formally verified protocols, has the aim of reducing security problems (e.g. those linked to backdoors) and mistakes. They also predominantly work on the assumption that the cryptography they develop should be understood by decision-makers in order to be deployed; as one of our interviewees put it, ‘no policy-maker should have to know the difference between the Decisional Diffie-Hellman and Computational Diffie-Hellman
property.’ They also mostly share an understanding that privacy is ‘hard to get
right’, due to the varieties of social contexts involved, which we examined in
Chapter 1. They are aware that in order for notions of privacy to be meaning-
ful and applicable to development processes, it is necessary to carefully define
the threat model and run simulations to see various empirical ways to measure
phenomena such as proximity or unlinkability. Finally, several developers are
aware that in order to rule out the possibility of backdoors in their or others’
software, the algorithms and protocols using cryptography need to be formally
verified or audited by external parties – an aspect that, as the reader will recall
from Chapter 5, was also included by the EFF in earlier versions of its evalu-
ation grids. However, for the reasons mentioned above, privacy is harder to
actually *verify*, and does not fit within formal verification frameworks; thus, it
is complicated to determine exactly what kinds of privacy are being discussed
and whether a given system can support it.

While developers do not expect policymakers to have cryptographic knowl-
edge, they operate within national and supra-national contexts where encyp-
tion, and the ability to compromise it, is an intensely political issue if not an
outright proxy for power – and, post-Snowden, increasingly so. In 2013, a few
months after Snowden’s revelations, the NSA was revealed to have discreetly
lobbied for the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to
include a weakened, possibly deliberately flawed algorithm in a 2006 cryptog-
raphy standard (Greenemeier 2013). And in 2016, a financial industry group
proposed a protocol called eTLS, omitting from it the forward secrecy feature
which had been incorporated into the latest version of the Transport Layer
Security (TLS) protocol. The European Telecommunications Standards Institute
(ETSI) released eTLS, rebaptised ETS to minimise ambiguity, as a standard in
the autumn of 2018, to great controversy (Leyden 2019) and steadfast opposi-
tion from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

Standardising bodies such as the IETF and its parallel organisation, the
Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), have shown, in the above controversy
as well as others, that they are well-positioned, via entities such as the IRTF-
chartered CryptoForum Research Group,⁶ to issue authoritative advice about
the safety of cryptographic algorithms. However, there are other important
sources of authoritative advice. In Europe, the promotion of best practices in the use of public cryptographic algorithms, their verification and the generation of cryptographic standards was until recently undertaken by the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA, which still uses this abbreviation, in reference to its original name: European Network and Information Security Agency); however now this function is being devolved down to the nation-states, which may entail risks (as discussed, pressures to introduce backdoors, or uneven levels of cryptographic knowledge within different national contexts).

Furthermore, several debates are taking place at the national level in European countries on end-to-end encryption and on how to strike a balance between the protection of digital rights and law enforcement. In 2017, the French Digital Council (CNNum) issued advice on encryption, reaffirming the usefulness and necessity of encryption technologies in light of the repeated attempts by the Ministry of Interior to challenge their use due to their potential exploitation by terrorists and criminals (CNNum 2017). In 2019, new and worrying signals came from Germany, where, after more than twenty years of unequivocal support for strong encryption (Herpig and Heumann 2019), a law is being examined that would force chat app providers to hand over, on demand, end-to-end encrypted conversations in plain text; this inclusion of Internet services providing encryption software would expand German law, which currently ‘merely’ allows communications to be gathered from a suspect’s device itself (Chapman 2019). In the United Kingdom, within the debates concerning the Investigatory Powers Act,⁷ the government issued a revised version of the bill that ‘clarifies the government’s position on encryption, making it clear that companies can only be asked to remove encryption that they themselves have applied, and only where it is practicable for them to do so’ (Carey 2016).

In response to the controversy around encryption in Germany, Roman Flepp, from a Swiss-based end-to-end encrypted instant messenger platform called Threema, that is popular among German-speaking users, asserted that: ‘Under no circumstances are we willing to make any compromises in this regard’ (quoted in Chapman 2019). However, as this book has shown, the road to ‘no compromises’ is in practice, for developers of secure messaging tools, paved with compromises – some of which relate to technical choices, others to the
user publics they target and still others to the broader geopolitical scenarios and
debates they operate within. Such debates will no doubt continue as encryption
remains a matter of intense public concern, which technologists are actively
involved in it, in both actions and words.

ON STANDARDISATION: SETTING (OPEN) NORMS AS SOLIDARITY AND TRANSPARENCY

The stories of secure messaging tools development told by this book are also
revealing about how the field is currently approaching issues of standardisation,
a process that is simultaneously technical and political; there is an ‘intimate
connection between standards and power’, a power that ‘lies in [standards’]
very subtlety’ (Busch 2011). Standards describe the specifications for code,
and this code may then be independently implemented in conformity with
the specification of various licensing options, ranging from open source to
proprietary. Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star have long since noted that
standards play an important role in the making of public policy and, more
broadly, of social order: ‘standards and classifications, however imbricated in
our lives, are ordinarily invisible [...yet] what are these categories? Who makes
them, and who may change them? When and why do they become visible?
How do they spread?’ (Bowker and Star 1999: 94). A number of case study
analyses of competing standards in information technology have contributed
to shed light on these processes, including the birth of the QWERTY keyboard
(David 1985) and the VHS vs Betamax controversy (Besen and Farrell 1994),
and, more recently, debates about the respective merits of two different Internet
protocols – IPv4 vs IPv6 (DeNardis 2009).

Technical standards take shape at once in material forms, in social and eco-
nomic interactions, and in their intended or inferred use. Several standards are
developed (and recognised as such) intentionally and result from regulatory
actions or from being voluntarily adopted. Such formally endowed standards are
developed by dedicated organisations, such as the International Standardization
Organization (ISO) or, for the Web, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C),
with the standards taking the form of documents that describe objects, their
properties and the extent to which they can be put under strain or stress without breaking or being compromised. One example is the IETF's Request for Comments, or RfC, whose very evolutions over time contribute to making visible the transformations of the IETF, including changes in both its organisational forms and practices (see Braman 2016).

For ‘ordinary’ users, the meaning and pervasiveness of standards in their everyday lives, as operative in a myriad of different situations, often escapes understanding (Star and Lampland 2009). The publication of a standard is only the beginning of the norm-making process – and indeed, as the Signal case examined in Chapter 2 has shown, sometimes it is not even a necessary step. The adoption of something close to a ‘standard’ may occur either de facto or accidentally, with seemingly minor decisions and actions becoming crucial for the development of a field in a particular direction. In some instances, what determines the adoption of an object, process or protocol as a standard is its ability to circulate and gain recognition: factors such as popular demand, perceived quality and the credibility of its developers become crucial for the standard’s success. The spread of standards through social, technical and institutional media is a multifaceted process; mechanisms of standardisation are economic, social and technical – with different degrees of intentionality – alongside the ‘official’ institutional practices of certification and harmonisation (Loconto and Busch 2010).

The issue of open standards seems particularly salient for encrypted messaging and their potential for ‘concealing for freedom’. Open standards are produced by standardising bodies that allow anyone to participate in the process. This openness is seen as maximising both transparency and the collective intelligence gained through the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ – this is argued to be particularly useful in standards around security and cryptography (Simcoe 2006). Open standard bodies have produced most of the technical standards that form the core of the Internet, like TCP/IP, HTML and TLS. As we started seeing at the end of the previous section, however, standard-setting bodies can be subject to lobbying and wider agenda-setting strategies that can, in some instances, even be characterised as manipulation. As we saw in Chapter 2, the perception of standard bodies as possibly fragile in the face of lobbying is the reason why
secure messaging developers increasingly emphasise the institutionalisation of
standardising bodies and their progressive distancing from coding communi-
ties, which often creates an environment that is less suitable for experimental
and unfinished projects (as is the case for several ‘young’ systems in the secure
messaging field).

However, our developer interviewees also emphasise that they perceive
differences between standardisation bodies, with several national and closed
standards organisations being seen as more prone to manipulation, whereas
open standards bodies are seen as having more rigorous processes. One of our
respondents referred to the contentious standardisation of Office Open XML
file formats in the late 2000s, which was ultimately designated as an ‘open’
standard by the International Standardization Organization – ISO, a standards
body composed solely of representatives from nation-states – following pressure
from Microsoft (see also Ryan 2008).

Unlike standards bodies comprising only commercial organisations (e.g.
ECMA, the European Computer Manufacturers Association), open standards
bodies usually employ a multi-stakeholder model, including public institutions,
private companies, universities and individuals. Open standards bodies for the
Internet include the IETF and, for the Web, W3C. A key aspect addressed by
such bodies is **patent disclosures**. Open standards, particularly those with
a royalty-free licensing policy like those produced by the W3C, are perceived
by our interviewees to be highly important due to their prohibition of patent
licensing fees. Bodies like the IETF force patent disclosures, and have been
protagonists in several controversies (e.g. the ETS controversy mentioned
above) in their efforts to prevent patented elements from becoming part of
open standards.

When it comes to the code underlying the systems we analyse in this book, we
can see a consensus among several developers – predominantly those involved
in federated and decentralised secure messaging solutions, but also including
some involved with centralised components, as we will see later with Signal.
Open source, our interviewees argue, should be supported both as a technologi-
cal principle and as a matter of policy, with some interviewees also suggesting
that policies should go even further to foster the adoption of free software (as
‘a matter of liberty, not price’⁸), as a political programme. This would include guaranteeing four fundamental ‘user freedoms’, in which the user should be able to: run the program in question as they wish, for any purpose; study how the program works, and potentially change it; redistribute copies; and distribute copies of their modified versions to others. This political programme is meant to go a step further than ensuring code is ‘open source’ and ‘open access’, although it assumes open access to code is a necessary precondition for freedom.

The free software movement originally came out of Richard Stallman's acknowledgment that the practice of sharing software, with its hacker culture heritage (Coleman 2013) was being increasingly 'enclosed' by commercial ventures. In order to create a legally binding form of resistance to these new enclosures, Stallman created the GPL (General Public License⁹), which postulated that the copyright on a given piece of software is allocated by default to the developer and that the developer can license their software to an unlimited number of people. The GPL license requires that all derivative works also use the GPL, thus preserving for posterity the aforementioned four fundamental user freedoms and enabling the software commons to grow virally. The GPL has proved to be a successful license and software methodology: GNU/Linux, which depends entirely on the GPL, subtends most of the Internet's architecture today and even Google's Android is based on a free software kernel, although Google outsources vital components to its proprietary cloud.

However, the ‘virality’ of the GPL can pose problems when there is the need to integrate with commercial software, as is often the case in public administration, a point that our interviewees are well aware of. Less strong open-source licenses, which retain the possibility of private actors copying a piece of software and making a proprietary version of it, again carry the risk of enclosure – as has been explored in recent work, this kind of ‘weak’ open licensing is an important motivation for many companies to fund open-source projects, as it opens the way to eventually fork parts of them into proprietary versions (O’Neil et al. 2020; Birkinbine 2020).

An interesting path for software designed in the public interest – which has, in the field of secure messaging, a notable precedent in Signal, one of its most widespread protocols and applications – seems to be a ‘dual license’ policy,
with server-side software being published using the Affero GPL (AGPL¹⁰), while client-side software uses the GPL v3.0. The AGPL software prevents free software from being made available as a service over a network, such as a web service, without the code being released. If someone wants to use this software in combination with commercial software, then the creators of the AGPL-licensed software retain the right to grant a non-exclusive and non-transferable 'dual license' on its use. This license can be granted for free to public administrations, while for-profit companies can be changed. This is the business model originally used by Signal, and it is an interesting attempt to preserve 'the best of both worlds', as one of our developer interviewees put it: allowing integration with commercial software on a case-by-case basis, while keeping the code itself free for the commons.

ENCRYPTING, DECENTRALISING AND STANDARDISING
ONLINE COMMUNICATIONS IN THE GDPR ERA

So far, this chapter has drawn from our fieldwork with secure messaging developers and users to analyse the different ways in which political effects can be achieved through technological choices at the crossroads of encryption and decentralisation of digital networks, as well as the attempts to build standards in the field. This section will tie these dynamics to broader political concerns related to privacy in our present time, in particular with the advent of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as the primary and most recent supra-national legal instrument aimed at securing privacy-related Internet freedoms at the European level.

In 2009, European Consumer Commissioner Meglena Kuneva acknowl-
edged that personal data was well on its way to becoming ‘the new oil of the
Internet’. One decade on, the inevitable resource wars for the control of mass
personal data began, with data extractivism – the strategy of the capture and
refinement of personal data to sell on the world market – becoming the primary
business model of Internet giants such as Google and Facebook. Public policy,
meanwhile, has struggled to fully understand the value of personal data and
to translate it, and a set of safeguards for it, into law. The GDPR is the most
recent and comprehensive attempt by the European Commission to use legal
means to ensure the ‘right to a private life’ in the sphere of digital data, which
prompts the question whether GDPR provides an effective answer to the erosion
of data sovereignty and integrity by technological platforms. While this book
cannot provide a full answer to this question, it has further demonstrated that
for data protection to be effective, it must also, if not primarily, be defended
technologically.

As Laura DeNardis eloquently puts it, ‘cyberspace now completely and often imperceptibly permeates offline spaces, blurring boundaries between material and virtual worlds’ (DeNardis 2020: 3): the ubiquity of the Internet has caused the world to be enveloped in a single, data-driven, technosocial system. Faced with this rapid and all-encompassing set of evolutions, policy has frequently treated emerging technologies primarily as hostile instruments threatening a status quo, thereby creating need for legal reform (see Elkin-Koren’s 2005 enlightening analysis of peer-to-peer), with, in particular, a frequent emphasis on decentralised and/or encryption technologies as enablers of crime and terrorism. In this conjuncture, any questions of data integrity, protection and control require a new approach, where rather than attempting to mandate laws that *apply* to the underlying technology, policymakers would encourage the *adoption* of technology contributing to maintain the society that they wish for. Putting rights-preserving technologies, such as ‘concealing for freedom’ systems, in the hands of local state actors and citizens may be the last and most effective bastion against data extractivism, especially if done in concert with the development of policies around data protection. In this sense, government-mandated organisations (such as the previously mentioned French Digital Council) have produced detailed advice on encryption technologies and have persuasively analysed why such technologies should not be banned, but encouraged. These documents establish a sort of ‘philosophy’ that, while it may or may not be followed in actual regulation, is interesting to assess as it takes shape.

Of course, recent (and less recent) scholarship has also analysed a number
of less-than-encouraging examples of policymakers fostering the adoption of
specific technologies as a tool for (co-)shaping society. Sociotechnical systems
like the Chinese ‘social credit system’, where a single government-run platform
is used to make decisions regarding nearly all aspects of their citizens lives, from
education to mobility, are run in a privacy-invasive manner that disregards the
fundamental rights of individuals, placing the data sovereignty of the nation
over that of the individual (Chen and Cheung 2017). And, in the Western
world, the inability of the United States to effectively regulate Silicon Valley
platforms was a crucial shortcoming, eventually leading to the construction of
extensive surveillance practices by private technical companies (Bauman et al.
2014). But precisely because technology is such an important arrangement of
power – that a variety of actors seek to achieve their Internet policy objectives
via choices of technical architecture and infrastructure, and specific uses of
them – the building of a rights-preserving technological alternative, supported
by laws that are both aware of the state-of-art of technology and co-evolve
with it, seem to be an interesting way to build novel technosocial systems that
preserve data integrity and sovereignty, both inside traditional national borders
and across these borders.

The ability to guarantee fundamental human rights via technology – to embed rights into technology – is gaining momentum, both in the realm of law (e.g. Article 25 of the GDPR, mandating data protection by design and by default) and in the realm of technology development. In this latter regard, the work of the IRTF’s Human Rights Protocol Considerations Research Group is especially interesting (see also ten Oever 2021). This research group, basing its work explicitly on the UN Human Rights Charter, attempts to undertake technical reviews of protocols so as to determine whether they are compliant with human rights. However, a shortcoming of this group’s work is that the review happens after the protocol has been designed, which restricts the possibility of modifying existing protocols. One encryption-related illustration of this has been the group’s support for the implementation of Encrypted SNIs (Server Name Indication, the indication of the one or more domain names one is connecting to via an IP address) in TLS 1.3, in order to prevent the ‘breaking’ of encryption by network operators in order to enable mass surveillance and censorship.

Given that standards bodies like the IETF and W3C have no legally binding
regulatory power at the nation-state level (unlike, for example, the ISO), their
primary role is to make recommendations, supported by the self-regulation of
the industry itself. Internet governance scholars have extensively analysed the
historical gap between the 'soft power' of self-regulating standards bodies like
the IETF and W3C and the extent to which they respectively created most of the
core standards of the Internet and Web. They have also assessed the fairly limited
effectiveness of bodies such as the ISO and International Telecommunications
Union (ITU), which are more closely linked to international organisations, in
particular the UN system, but whose standards (and procedures to attain them)
have much less endorsement from Internet technologists (see Mueller 2012;
more broadly Harcourt et al. 2020).

However, the more open, ‘multi-stakeholder’ standards bodies, such as IETF and W3C, are not without pressure from specific groups of actors. A recent controversy illustrating this has focused on the standardisation of Encrypted Media Extensions for Digital Rights Management tools, pushed by Silicon Valley giants (Netflix and Google in particular). This took place in the face of protests by civil society groups, such as the Electronic Freedom Frontier Foundation, and objections from political figures like European Parliament representatives Julia Reda and Lucy Anderson, who were concerned about how DRM violated ‘fair use’ rights in Europe, as well as fundamental human rights (Reda and Anderson 2017). Tim Berners-Lee himself, the inventor of the Web, eventually yielded to powerful lobbying and supported the DRM standard, arguably to maintain the relevance of the W3C in the face of the Web’s slow monopolisation (McCarthy 2017). European standardisation bodies (both national and supra-national) have also at times proved unreliable in their defence of users’ fundamental rights: for example, during the aforementioned controversy over encrypted SNIs, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) ‘forked’ the IETF standard TLS 1.3 in order to create a ‘backdoor’ explicitly rejected by the IETF, removing the encrypted SNIs supported by human rights activists and enforcing cryptography that would allow monitoring of encrypted traffic by a ‘middlebox’ between a user and a website. While the ETSI justified this choice as useful for quality-of-service and monitoring enterprises, its implications for making mass surveillance easier were emphasised by commentators (Leyden 2019). Unlike other entities that are part of the Internet governance
galaxy, such as the Internet Governance Forum – an arena for discussion with
no decision-making power – standardisation bodies are by design not meant
to include civil society at large in their discussion and consensus-making
procedures. Thus, the risk exists that the governance of online privacy and
surveillance, including encryption issues – and in particular the governance
that includes the making of standards for this area – will become increasingly
unfettered from human rights. This could override traditional forms of sover-
eignty and the human rights protection system of ‘checks and balances’, to shift
towards a ‘state of exception’ where the private sector would hold excessive and
largely unsupervised power.

To summarise, standardisation bodies are under pressure, as they are often
not multi-stakeholder, and their actions can cause collateral damage in the
absence of safeguards. For all these reasons, it will be increasingly difficult to
maintain human rights as an important component of standards-related dis-
cussions, and there is a pressing risk that standardisation will happen without
taking them into account.

*The GDPR in the multi-architectural world of online communications*

While the GDPR is the first global privacy framework that extends the rights
of European citizens into technological platforms in other national jurisdic-
tions – and for this reason has been hailed as a historic achievement of legislation
(Gérot and Maxwell 2020) – it has been created in reference to a particular type
of architectural configuration, one that is centralised and server-based, and the
dominant model in the contemporary landscape of Internet-based services.

The General Data Protection Regulation is based on the core concept of
informed consent, where in order to maintain user's autonomy over their data,
users must be informed both about what personal data is being collected by
a particular web service, called the data controller, and how this data is being
processed by possible third parties, called data processors. For example, when
using a service such as an online newspaper, the user must be informed of
their rights and then 'opt-in' to the usage of their data and its distribution to ad
networks (e.g. Google's advertisements) which are data processors. A citizen
thus ideally is granted rights and control over their data in order for their digital
autonomy to be maintained. However, the General Data Protection Regulation
has been controversial because of what its enforcement has led to in practice.
As recent studies have shown (e.g. Utz et al. 2019; Herrle and Hirsch, 2019),
citizens are cognitively overwhelmed by the scope and scale of the processing
of their personal data, and a gap often forms between the ground-breaking goals
of the General Data Protection Regulation and its implementation. Users are
confronted by endless email approvals and online forms that claim to give a data
controller consent, often phrased in inscrutable ways, and often presenting a
'take it or leave it approach', leaving citizens with the impression of being forced
to comply with a package of limitations in order to use the contemporary Web.

While it is out of scope for this book to comment extensively on the GDPR,
we will highlight here one particular aspect: the extent to which one core hypoth-
esis that subtended its creation may affect its effectiveness when it comes to the
tools for secure communications we analyse. For, as a regulation, the GDPR
is fundamentally based on the paradigm of centralised architecture: the data
controllers are assumed to be large, centralised servers under the control of
external entities in the 'Cloud', with any processing of data being undertaken by
a discrete number of data processors, assumed to be other external third-party
'cloud' servers. Further, the assumption is both that these data processors are
known in advance by the data controller and that their identity can be commu-
nicated to the user before the personal data is transferred to the data controller.

These assumptions seem problematic, though, in light of the great variety
of architectural and encrypting arrangements we have examined. First, GDPR
Article 24 requires controllers to implement systems capable of demonstrat-
ing that the processing of personal data is performed in accordance with the
GDPR. For server-side 'cloud'-based infrastructure, this seems difficult if not
impossible, as neither the user nor any legal body has insight into the data pro-
cessing in the server-side cloud, which is opaque by design. The flows between
data processors are thus also unknown to the user, and often processing is done
in new and unforeseen ways via shadowy networks of data processors whose
complexity is difficult to grasp, much less enumerate – as it is nearly impossible
to prevent the copying of data. Second, although concrete measures such as data
minimisation and pseudonymisation are discussed by Article 25 (centred on
privacy 'by design' and 'by default' as discussed above), it is unclear how they
can be assessed based on a centralised architecture. Finally, the GDPR hinges
not only on the promise of the server-side data controller being transparent,
but also on the assumption that consent for these increasingly opaque dataflows
can be meaningfully given by the user. It appears that attempting to place these
constraints on current centralised cloud-based services is quixotic, as the data
protection action assumes the centralised platforms' good faith - while in many
cases, such platforms' business models are based primarily on data extractiv-
ism. It is likely for this very reason that centralised platforms like Facebook and
Google would rather opt to be fined by the European Commission, or specific
European countries - no matter how substantial the fines are - than comply with
the substance of GDPR, which would require an in-depth 're-architecturing'
of their technologies.

What is in the GDPR, then, for more decentralised and federated architec-
tures? It has been suggested that a move away from centralised platforms to
alternatives based on blockchain as an architectural principle could be used to
're-architect' a new generation of platforms more in line with securing user's
rights. However, scholars have argued that in its current state, blockchain tech-
nology is not mature enough to be compatible with data protection regulations
(Halpin and Piekarska 2017). Institutions have mobilised on the issue as well:
the European Union Blockchain Observatory and Forum has remarked that the
EU's courts and data protection authorities have so far highlighted three main
tensions between the distributed ledger technologies and the EU's new data
protection rules, namely: the difficulties in identifying the obligations of data
controllers and processors; disagreements about when personal data should
be anonymised; and the difficulty of exercising new data subject rights. This
includes the right to be forgotten and the possibility of erasing certain data,
given that personal data shared on a blockchain prevents censorship (including
changing or erasing the data by legal request of a data subject), is cryptographi-
cally intertwined into the entire blockchain by design and is public by default.
As a solution, the authors propose four rule-of-thumb principles: Technologies
designing systems for public usage should 'start with the big picture' and decide
whether blockchain is needed and really meets their data needs; they should avoid storing personal data on blockchain and use data obfuscation and encryption techniques instead; if blockchain cannot be avoided, they should favour private, permissioned blockchain networks; and they should be transparent with users (EU Blockchain Observatory 2018).

Beyond the blockchain, decentralised networks that use end-to-end encryption and privacy enhancing-technologies, both federated and P2P, are likely to be more easily compliant with the GDPR and superior to several applications of the blockchain (e.g. from an environmental standpoint – proof of work requires substantial computing resources, and thus energy consumption). However, the challenges such technologies face both at the development stage and in relation to large-scale adoption by users are numerous and have been discussed at length in this book, especially in Chapters 3 and 4. From a theoretical standpoint, in the case of p2p networks, the user herself is the data controller, and freely chooses her own data processors and who to share data with. For federated networks, the data controller will be the entity that runs the server. If end-to-end encryption is used in both these models, then in decentralised systems the personal data are hidden from the data controller in the federated setting and from other peers in a P2P setting, and so uses of the data that are not explicitly authorised by the user are rendered technically impossible. Privacy-enhancing technologies, as we have seen throughout the more empirically oriented chapters of this book, can then be used to limit the scope of third parties from determining even the metadata of communication, rendering the data anonymised by default and so unable to be processed without consent.

Decentralised and encrypted protocols are potentially capable of providing a robust technological solution for data protection, one that is compatible with recent legislation. A marriage between these two dynamics has been identified, by the NEXTLEAP project and beyond, as a promising way forward in the quest to ‘conceal for freedom’. However, as this book – and other previous and current work – has shown, ‘reclaiming the Internet’ (Aigrain 2010; Musiani and Méadel 2016) by fostering the coexistence of a variety of architectural, economic and governance arrangements, is a far-from-linear process: one that will include a good deal of experimentation with assemblages of human and
non-human actors, rearrangements in power balances and attempts to place
Internet rights and freedoms at the core of the technical development and
standardisation processes.

SOCIAL STUDIES OF ENCRYPTION WITHIN INTERNET
GOVERNANCE RESEARCH: MOVING FORWARD

In the final months of writing this book, two book-length contributions were published that are closely connected with the present work. Linda Monsees' *Crypto-Politics: Encryption and Democratic Practices in the Digital Era* (2019) explores the post-Snowden debates on digital encryption in Germany and the United States, showing how discussions about the value of privacy and the legitimacy of surveillance practices have closely merged with controversies around encryption technologies, making encryption a subject of tech-nopolitical contestation within multiple expert circles. Philip DiSalvo's *Digital Whistleblowing Platforms for Journalism: Encrypting Leaks* (2020) delves into whistleblowing platforms as an increasingly important phenomenon for journalism in the post-Snowden era, as safer solutions for communicating with whistleblowers and obtaining leaks; DiSalvo explores the potentials of, and needs for, encryption for journalistic purposes, together with the perils of surveillance.

Together with the kind of work we propose in this book, with our investiga-
tion of the development and user appropriation of encrypted secure messaging
tools, these recent works reaffirm the importance of encryption as an issue
worthy of investigation via methods and concepts derived from STS. With this
book, we have followed developers as they interact with other stakeholders
and with the technical artefacts they design – with a core common objective
of creating tools that ‘conceal for freedom’, while differing in their intended
technical architectures, their targeted user publics and the underlying values
and business models. Together, these stories flesh out the *experience* of encryp-
tion in the variety of secure messaging protocols and tools existing today, and
its implications for the ‘making of’ digital liberties. Collectively, our book and
these other recent works show how encryption takes shape both in visions for
online freedoms and in very concrete, and diverse, sets of implementations –
and how this is a core issue of Internet governance.

Internet governance, as a recent and increasingly dynamic body of work sug-
gests, is as much about the work of institutions, and about legislative processes,
as it is about the ‘mundane practices’ and the agency of technology designers,
developers, hackers, maintainers and users as they interact, in a distributed
fashion, with technologies, rules and regulations, leading to both intended
and unintended consequences with systemic effects (Epstein, Katzenbach and
Musiani 2016). STS approaches such as those we have adopted in this book can
help in empirically analysing the diverse forms of decision-making and coor-
dination activities that take place beyond formal and well-defined boundaries
(van Eeten and Mueller 2013).

Such an approach is especially relevant at a time when online surveillance
and privacy, and the technological and legal means to limit the former and
protect the latter, are being identified (e.g. by Mueller and Badiei 2020) as
the pre-eminent Internet governance-related issue of the last decade. It is
an issue that has been catalysed by the Snowden revelations, but that has its
roots in longstanding debates about personal data, identity on the Internet
and cryptology. Arguably, the era ushered in by the Snowden revelations is
one where the world took full measure of the extent of the United States’ de
facto global authority ‘by infrastructure’ on the Internet and became aware
of the depth of the US government’s ‘dangerous liaisons’ with private inter-
mediaries (Musiani 2013). This opened up a major crisis of legitimacy for
the US to keep on acting as the foremost actor in Internet governance, and
arguably – even if the process was, slowly but surely, already underway before
Snowden – contributed to the so-called ‘IANA transition’, the process through
which the US relinquished their control of the Domain Name System root,
and which led to substantial reforms in the accountability mechanisms used
in managing it by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
(ICANN).

In parallel, recent years have also witnessed the rise of new ‘superpowers’
in Internet governance, most notably Russia and China (see e.g. Litvinenko
2020 and Negro 2017), whose predominant strategy has been to achieve ‘digital
sovereignty’. This is the idea that states should reassert their authority over the Internet and protect their nation’s self-determination in the digital sphere, not by means of supranational alliances or international instruments, but by increasing their independence and autonomy at various technical, economic and political levels.

In this multi-faceted contemporary Internet governance scenario, encryption is becoming a central issue. As scholars of encryption grounded in the social sciences, we examine the variety of ways in which journalists and activists choose and use encrypted tools to communicate with their sources and explore the numerous arenas where technopolitical controversies about encryption happen. In the present work, we have analysed secure messaging protocols and applications as they are developed and made their own by different groups of pioneer users, and we shed light on the manifold ways in which the ‘making, governing and using’ of encryption in online communications unfolds; in doing so we have contributed to articulating and solidifying the study of the ‘mundane practices’ of Internet governance. At the same time, we have explored how these practices cannot do without a constant entwining with the institutional arenas in which political narratives and agendas about encryption unfold – an aspect which has been the focus of this concluding chapter. Indeed, institutions of Internet governance can and should be analysed with the help of the STS toolbox, understanding their authority not as a *fait accompli*, but as a result of their ability to renegotiate and reconfigure themselves in moments of controversy and destabilisation, in order to maintain momentum and legitimacy (see Flyverbom 2011 and Pohle 2016).

We also contribute to conceptualising encryption as a fully interdisciplinary subject of study, one that is as much the prerogative of social sciences as of computer science and legal studies, by unveiling the ‘informal’ dimensions of power arrangements surrounding it. Informal they may be, but they are no less crucial than institutional debates and decision-making processes in co-shaping our rights and freedoms – as citizens of online communications, and as stakeholders of how the Internet is governed today and will be governed tomorrow.
NOTES

1 The HADOPI (quasi-acronym, in French, of Haute Autorité pour la Diffusion des Œuvres et la Protection des droits d'auteur sur Internet) law, or ‘Creation and Internet’ law, was a law introduced in 2009 in France, mandating the so-called ‘graduated response’ or ‘three-strikes procedure’ that could eventually allow a user’s Internet connection to be terminated in case of repeated offense (even though enforcement in practice never reached this final and drastic step because of widespread controversy and eventual abrogation of the law).

2 See Chapter 3 and, in particular, the discussions concerning the implementation of Briar's group chat.

3 One being ClaimChain, a protocol developed by the NEXTLEAP project.

4 Examples are the DECODE project, which has a decentralisation dimension in addition to an open-source one, and in France, the Territoire Apprenant Contributif (TAC) experiment in Plaine Commune, Ile-de-France, which aims to propose an innovative appropriation of digital technologies by the territory to test new economic and social models, through the implementation of a new distributed network architecture, https://recherchecontributive.org.

5 Recent history is again useful here, in recalling that, in an infamous case of subversion of a standards body, the Dual EC pseudorandom number generator (used to generate keys), ratified by the US standards agency NIST, had a backdoor placed in it by the NSA; this backdoor was placed in Juniper routers, and was later exploited by a yet-unknown actor to compromise these routers and then install their own backdoor to decrypt network traffic (Checkoway et al. 2016).

6 https://irtf.org/cfrg.

7 An Act of the Parliament in the United Kingdom (approved in 2016) that sets out and expands the electronic surveillance powers of the country's intelligence services and law enforcement agencies.

8 https://www.fsf.org/about.

9 https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html.

10 https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html.
<figure><img src="image_20.png" /></figure>
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# APPENDIX

## INTERVIEW SELECTION PROCESS AND ETHICAL GUIDELINES

INTERVIEW SUBJECTS WHO WERE ALSO DEVELOPERS WERE SELECTED ACCORDING to pre-existing personal relationships that researchers had with the cryptographic research community of NEXTLEAP research team members. Although this does result in some bias, we believe it is countered by the large number of interviews we have undertaken. The relatively small size of the global developer community might also be considered in mitigation. We also reached out to some developers via the GitLab and GitHub pages of projects to which we did not have personal connections (e.g. Ricochet, Conversations).

In contrast, user studies were undertaken with individuals who were selected more by chance. Some attended training events in their local environments (both high-risk, in the case of Ukraine and Russia, and low risk in the case of France, Germany, Austria and the United Kingdom). Some attended conferences in pre-selected venues that were determined by us to be likely to attract high-risk users who lived in areas that, due to the level of repression they were likely experiencing, would make it difficult if not impossible to interview them in their local environment, or would make it such that they could not speak openly in their native environment. This was the case for users from Egypt, Turkey, Kenya and Iran, where the interviews took place in March 2017 at the Internet Freedom Festival and at RightsCon. A total of 54 interviews were completed in a first phase of fieldwork between autumn 2016 and spring 2017. We interviewed developers (17), experts from NGOs focused on privacy and
security, such as EFF, Tactical Tech and Privacy International (5), and eve-
ryday users (32). Developers from LEAP and Pixelated (PGP), ChatSecure
(OTR), Signal protocol and its implementations and forks (including Wire and
Conversations (OMEMO)) were interviewed, as well as developers from Tor,
Briar and Ricochet that use their own custom protocols.

Within user groups we distinguish between high-risk users (14) and users
(including researchers and students) from low-risk countries (18). The devel-
opers were all from the USA/Western Europe, and the high-risk users included
users from Ukraine, Russia, Egypt, Lebanon, Kenya and Iran. Some high-risk
users, due to the conditions in their country, had left (4) or maintained dual
residency (2) between their high-risk environment and a low-risk environment.
The ‘users’ category also includes a subset (18) of security trainers, for exam-
ple users involved in organising seminars on security, disseminating privacy-
enhancing technologies, practices and knowledge. We interviewed trainers from
both high-risk (9) and low-risk countries (9).

A second round of interviews (28) took place in 2018. It focused in par-
ticular on aspects of project governance, and as such mostly developers (14)
and corporate users (8) were interviewed, in addition to other users living in
high-risk environments (6).

A specific protocol was developed in order to protect the privacy of our
respondents: if they wished to complete the interview online, we let users and
developers suggest a tool of communication of their choice to us. These tools
ranged from PGP to Signal, meet.jitsi, Wire and WhatsApp. If an ‘in person’
interview was preferred, the interview was recorded with an audio recorder
isolated from the Internet. We use a dedicated encrypted hard drive to store
the interviews. Before the interview we asked our respondents to carefully
read two user-consent forms related to the study and ask any questions they
might have regarding their privacy, their rights and our methodology. The two
forms were written in collaboration with UCL usability researchers and were
based on the European General Data Protection Regulation. The documents
included an Information Sheet and an Informed Consent Form. The first docu-
ment explained the purpose of the interview, described the research project
and clearly mentioned the sources of funding for the project. It also provided
information about the length of the interview, as well as information about the
researcher, including her email, full name, academic affiliation and the address
of the research institution. The second form described the data processing pro-
cedures and the period and conditions of data storage; it emphasised the right
of the interviewees to demand, at any moment, to withdraw their data from
the research. A copy of each document was given to the interviewee. Different
forms were used for users and developers.

Additional measures have been taken to ensure enhanced privacy for our interviewees. Thus, the name of the interviewee was not mentioned during the recording. We also adapted some questions to withdraw any elements of context (such as the country or the city, the precise social movement or affinity group a user was involved in and so on), if interviewees asked for this. We respected the right of our interviewees to refuse to answer a specific question. However, our questions were specifically designed to focus on digital tools, with no biographical questions included. The names of both developers and users are mentioned in this book only when a user gave us permission to do so; otherwise, users remain anonymised and we instead use qualifying labels such as ‘lead developer of…’ or ‘high-risk user from…’
<figure><img src="image_21.png" /></figure>
# GLOSSARY

**Build:** In software development, the term may refer either to the process by which source code is converted into a stand-alone form that can be run on a computer, or to the form itself. One of the most important steps of a software build is the compilation process, where source code files are converted into executable code. See also https://www.techopedia.com/definition/3759/build

**Chat-over-email:** An approach to designing instant messaging applications using email transfer protocols, such as SMTP and IMAP, often with an implementation of PGP on top, to offer end-to-end encryption. The most well-known projects of a chat-over-email app are Delta Chat, COI, Spike and MailTime.

**Client-server:** Computer networking model where the machines that communicate are not equivalent: one is a server, permanently on and waiting for connections, the others are clients, who connect when they have something to ask.

**Client-side implementation:** 'Client-side' means that the action takes place on the user's (the client's) computer, as opposed to 'server-side' which means that the action takes place on a web server.

**Constant bit rate encoding:** In telecommunications, the term indicates a situation in which the rate at which data is consumed by a codec (a device that encodes or decodes a data stream) is constant.

**(Cryptographic) deniability:** Encryption technique that allows 'denying' the existence of an encrypted file or message, in the sense that an adversary is unable to prove that the associated data exists.

**Double Ratchet:** Key management algorithm developed by the creators of Signal (Trevor Perrin and Moxie Marlinspike) in 2013, which manages
the ongoing renewal and maintenance of short-lived session keys after a first
key exchange. It is a 'double' ratchet because it combines a cryptographic
component with a key derivation function.

**End-to-end encryption:** Only the communicating parties can read the message, which is encrypted in transit *and* on users' terminals.

**Ephemeral key exchange:** See **key exchange**. With ephemeral methods, a different key is used for each connection.

**Ephemeral (or disappearing) messaging:** Mobile-to-mobile transmission of multimedia messages that automatically disappear from the recipient's screen after the message has been viewed. See also https://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/ephemeral-messaging

**Forking:** Forking a piece of software during its development process means that developers take a copy of its source code and start independent development on it, creating a separate piece of software. An act of forking is generally not merely a technical issue, but involves a (governance/organisational) change, possibly conflictual, in the developer community.

**Forward/future secrecy:** A cryptographic feature of the last generation of instant messaging apps, ensuring that a user's **session keys** will not be compromised even if the private key of the server *is* compromised. In particular, it is meant to protect past sessions against future compromises of secret keys or passwords.

**F/OSS (Free and Open-Source Software):** Software that anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study and change in any way, and whose source code is openly shared so that people are encouraged to voluntarily improve the design of the software.

**Gossiping/gossip protocol:** A process of peer-to-peer communication between computers which ensures that data is disseminated to all members of a group; in the absence of a central registry, the only way to spread data is to rely on each member to pass it along to their neighbours. Thus, gossip protocols are based on the way epidemics spread, and are also called epidemic protocols.

**Group messaging:** Holding a conversation via a messaging application between two or more people.
**Hash**: A function that converts an input of letters and numbers into an encrypted output of a fixed length.

**Header (email)**: A code snippet in an HTML email, which precedes the body of the email and contains information about the sender, recipient, the email's route to get to the inbox and a number of authentication details. See https://sendpulse.com/support/glossary/email-header

**Interoperability**: The ability of programs (messaging apps or any kind of software) to exchange data and communicate smoothly with each other.

**IP address**: A numerical label assigned to each device connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. An IP address has the two main functions of acting as a host or network interface identifier and providing location addressing.

**IPv6**: The most recent version of the Internet Protocol, the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet.

**Key exchange (v. key discovery)**: In **public key cryptography**, key exchange is the method by which cryptographic keys are exchanged between two parties; key verification is any way that lets you match a key to a person, making sure that it is indeed that person who uses the key (see e.g. https://ssd.eff.org/en/glossary/key-verification)

**Key management**: All operations related to the management of cryptographic keys in an encrypted system, including their generation, exchange, storage, use, destruction and replacement.

**Latency**: In engineering, latency is the time interval between a stimulation and a response, or, from a more general point of view, a time delay between the cause and the effect of some change in the system being observed.

**MAC (media access control) address**: A unique identifier assigned to a network interface controller (a hardware component connecting a computer to a network) to use as an address in a communication.

**Mail User Agent**: a computer application that allows a user to send and retrieve email – colloquially called an email program.

**Man-in-the-middle attack**: In computer security, MITM is an attack where the attacker secretly relays and possibly alters the communications
between two parties who believe that they are directly communicating
with each other.

**Mesh networks:** A network model in which the infrastructure nodes connect directly, dynamically and non-hierarchically to as many other nodes as possible and cooperate with one another to efficiently route data.

**Metadata:** Succinctly defined as 'information about information', the data providing information about one or more aspects of the data itself. Metadata is used to summarise basic information about data, which can make tracking and working with specific data easier.

**Mixnet (mix network):** Routing protocols that create hard-to-trace communications by using a chain of servers known as *mixes*, which take in messages from multiple senders, shuffle them and send them back out in random order to the next destination. *De facto*, this breaks the link between the source of the request and the destination, making it harder for third parties to trace end-to-end communications.

**Network-layer protection:** The network interface layer is the physical interface between the host system and the network hardware, which defines how data packets should be formatted for transmission and routings. This layer has several security vulnerabilities unique to it, needing specific protection responses.

**Non-repudiation:** Assurance that someone cannot deny the validity of a particular operation; in cryptography, the concept refers to a service that is able to provide proof of the origin of data as well as their integrity.

**OMEMO:** stands for ‘OMEMO Multi-End Message and Object Encryption’, an encryption protocol developed to solve specific limitations and problems that existed both in OpenPGP and in OTR. It provides future and forward secrecy and deniability and gives the possibility of message synchronisation and offline delivery.

**Open standards and protocols:** non-proprietary, open source, well-documented protocols that have been standardised by relevant institutions and are available to be reused and shared by the wider developer community. Open standards are usually believed to ensure better **interoperability** and improve further collaboration between projects based on open standards.
**Out of band (data)**: The data transferred through a stream that is independent from the main data stream ('in band'). An out-of-band data mechanism provides a conceptually independent channel, which allows any data sent via that mechanism to be kept separate from in-band data.

**OTR (Off-the-Record Messaging)**: A cryptographic protocol that provides encryption for instant messaging conversations. In addition to authentication and encryption, OTR provides **forward secrecy**. Version 4 of the protocol (OTRv4) is currently being designed by a team led by Sofia Celi and reviewed by Nik Unger and Ian Goldberg.

**Passive attack**: An attack on a network in which the attacker does not – as it cannot – interact with any of the parties involved, thus attempting to break the system solely based upon observed data.

**Pastebin**: A type of online content hosting service where users can store plain text.

**Patent disclosure**: A public claim of data about an invention; more generally, any part of a patenting process in which data regarding an invention is disclosed to the public. A patent disclosure is used by individuals such as inventors and attorneys, seeking to prepare a patent application. A patent disclosure provides information on the invention and its originality/unique-ness. See also https://www.upcounsel.com/patent-disclosure.

**Peer-to-peer (p2p)**: Computer networking model where two machines or two humans communicate directly to exchange messages, files, or other data.

**Primitive (cryptographic)**: Well-established, low-level cryptographic algorithms, frequently used as a basis to build cryptographic protocols.

**Protocol**: Referring to the Internet, this word indicates a set of criteria and procedures that provide the conceptual model of the network of networks, as well as the set of specifications that explain how data should be regrouped into packets, addressed, transmitted, routed and received.

**Public-key (or asymmetric) cryptography**: Cryptographic system that uses pairs of keys: public keys which may be disseminated widely, and private keys known only to the owner.

**Public-key infrastructure**: The set of roles, policies and procedures needed to create, manage, distribute and use public-key cryptography.
**Pull request:** In software development, a pull request is a method of submitting contributions to an open development project, which occurs when a developer (or an expert user) asks for changes committed to an external repository to be considered for inclusion in a project's main repository.

**PGP (Pretty Good Privacy):** An encryption programme that provides privacy and authentication for online communications. PGP is used for signing, encrypting and decrypting texts, e-mails, files, directories and disk partitions, as well as increasing the security of e-mail communications.

**Security vs Usability:** A widely discussed hypothesis according to which it is extremely hard to design truly secure communication systems and still keep them user-friendly.

**Server Name Indication (SNI):** An extension to the Transport Layer Security (TLS) computer networking protocol by which a client indicates which hostname it is attempting to connect to at the start of the handshake process.

**Server-side archives:** When an e-mail program uses this option, the mail server archives to the mail server itself, or to another server designated as the archive server. This is opposed to client-based archiving, when the individual workstations process mail file archiving. Mail is archived either to the mail server, a designated server, or to its local workstations.

**Server-side encryption:** Data is encrypted on the server (of the company providing the messaging services).

**Social graph:** A graph (representation of a structure) representing social relations between a set of entities, e.g. individuals.

**TLS (Transport Layer Security):** Cryptographic protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network. TLS aims primarily to provide data integrity and privacy between two or more communicating computer applications.

**Two-factor authentication:** In an Internet-based service, this is a method of confirming users' claimed identities by using a combination of *two* among these different factors: (1) something they know, (2) something they have, or (3) something they are.
**XMPP**: Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, originally named Jabber and created by the eponymous community, is a communication protocol based on XML (Extensible Markup Language). Unlike most instant messaging protocols, XMPP is defined in an open standard and uses an open systems approach for its development and application. https://xmpp.org/

**UI/UX design**: User experience design is the process of influencing user behaviour by acting upon some features of a product, such as usability and accessibility. User interface design is the design of the graphical layout of an application – all the items the user interacts with. The two processes are generally considered as part of a whole.

**Untrusted server problem**: Being able to provide security even in the event of a 'worst case scenario' server breach, where an attacker has full control of server resources, including the ability to read and modify back-end application code and data and remain undetected for at least some time.

**Upcycling (of protocols)**: An approach to designing instant messaging applications by reusing existing open standards and protocols, instead of creating new ones. This approach is said to increase interoperability and help engage bigger communities of developers, as it is based on open standards or well documented protocols.

**Usable security**: The interdisciplinary research field that addresses the usability of secure communication technologies.
<figure><img src="image_22.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_23.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_24.png" /></figure>
MATTERING PRESS TITLES

*Engineering the Climate: Science, Politics and Visions of Control*

JULIA SCHUBERT

*With Microbes*

EDITED BY CHARLOTTE BRIVES, MATTHÄUS REST AND SALLA SARIOLA

*Environmental Alterities*

EDITED BY CRISTÓBAL BONELLI AND ANTONIA WALFORD

*Sensing In/Security*

EDITED BY NINA KLIMBURG-WITJES, NIKOLAUS POECHHACKER & GEOFFREY C. BOWKER

*Energy Worlds in Experiment*

EDITED BY JAMES MAGUIRE, LAURA WATTS AND BRITT ROSS WINTHEREIK

*Boxes: A Field Guide*

EDITED BY SUSANNE BAUER, MARTINA SCHLÜNDER AND MARIA RENTETZI

*An Anthropology of Common Ground: Awkward Encounters in Heritage Work*

NATHALIA SOFIE BRICHET

*Ghost-Managed Medicine: Big Pharma's Invisible Hands*

SERGIO SISMONDO

*Inventing the Social*

EDITED BY NOORTJE MARRES, MICHAEL GUGGENHEIM, ALEX WILKIE

*Energy Babble*

ANDY BOUCHER, BILL GAVER, TOBIE KERRIDGE, MIKE MICHAEL, LILIANA OVALLE, MATTHEW PLUMMER-FERNANDEZ AND ALEX WILKIE

*The Ethnographic Case*

EDITED BY EMILY YATES-DOERR AND CHRISTINE LABUSKI

*On Curiosity: The Art of Market Seduction*

FRANCK COCHOY

*Practising Comparison: Logics, Relations, Collaborations*

EDITED BY JOE DEVILLE, MICHAEL GUGGENHEIM AND ZUZANA HRDLIČKOVÁ

*Modes of Knowing: Resources from the Baroque*

EDITED BY JOHN LAW AND EVELYN RUPPERT

*Imagining Classrooms: Stories of Children, Teaching and Ethnography*

VICKI MACKNIGHT
<figure><img src="image_25.png" /></figure>