Aside from everything else, I don't understand what Whittaker's point was; she seemed to ultimately be advocating for something, but I can't understand what, exactly.
It's probably in the talk's last sentences:
> We want not only the right to deploy e2ee and privacy-preserving tech, but the power to make determinations about how, and for whom, our computational infrastructures work.
This is the path to privacy, and to actual tech accountability. And we should accept nothing less.
But who are "we" and "whom", and what "computational infrastructure" is she referring to?
I can fill that in for you I think. The "We" and "Whom" are you, me, the arbitrary host/admin/user.
If you look at the regulatory trends developing around tech at the moment there are a lot of pushes to slap obligations on the host essentially toe the societal line of their geopolity. You will spy on your users. You will report this and that. You will not allow this group or that group.
This tightening acts in part to encourage centralization, which is regulable by the state, and discourage decentralization, which is at best, notionally doable.
The power of technologically facilitated networking has, prior to the Internet, been in large part a luxury of the State or Entity granted legitimacy by the State. With everyone having the potential to take their networks dark enough where the State level actors legitimately revert to having to physically compromise the infrastructure instead of being able to just snoop the line, it's a threat to the edifice of power currently extant to under a bottom up inversion.
No longer would the big boys in the current ivory tower be able to sit on high and know that there may be threats purely by sitting on SIGINT and data processing and storage alone. The primitive of true communications and signalling sovereignty would be in the hands of every individual. Which the establishment would like to cordially remind you includes those dirty terrorists, pedophiles, communists, <group you are mandated to treat as an outgroup>. So therefore, everyone must give up this power and conduct affairs is a monitorable way to make those other people stand out. Because you're all "good" people. And "good" people have nothing to fear.
You can't deplatform persona non grata from infra they've already largely built for themselves, which is a terrifying prospect to the current power structure.
> The primitive of true communications and signalling sovereignty would be in the hands of every individual.
That's great and all, but how does that help with mass surveillance by big tech? How would "true communications and signalling sovereignty" shield me from Google, Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter, etc.?
> Aside from everything else, I don't understand what Whittaker's point was; she seemed to ultimately be advocating for something, but I can't understand what, exactly.
The whole talk felt like it was gearing up to making a point but then it ended. It turned out that the point was to blame our current situation on the "sins of the 90s". To be fair, it was in the title all along so I'm not sure why I was expecting otherwise.
It's probably in the talk's last sentences:
> We want not only the right to deploy e2ee and privacy-preserving tech, but the power to make determinations about how, and for whom, our computational infrastructures work. This is the path to privacy, and to actual tech accountability. And we should accept nothing less.
But who are "we" and "whom", and what "computational infrastructure" is she referring to?