I was probably being a bit defensive about claims that this is just a ploy, having sat next to the team working on this for the past year and seen what they had to fight for and push back against just to get this out the door and into people's hands.
As far as risking the lives of other people, I think that in our world we tend to assume that being able to eastablish secure channels is not incredibly difficult. We know where to go and what tools to use. 99.99% of the planet lacks this knowledge, and if secure communication is not built in to the tools they use then they will not even know what they are missing.
Facebook (and Messenger) is used in places where the wrong word can get you "dissappeared", and is used to organize events and movements that can have global consequences. Having a tool that enables you to easily establish a secure channel to someone else and know that if you destroy your device then no one, not even Facebook itself, can get the contents of your messages is a powerful thing. Even rubber-hose cryptography can't compromise you or the person you are communicating with.
A useful and easy to use tool like Messenger with this new capability can have profound effects, and knowing that they are using something like the OWS libs to make it all work rather than rolling their own or just giving up and saying that security and mass-market tools cannot co-exist is something I think should be encouraged rather than dismissed.
As far as risking the lives of other people, I think that in our world we tend to assume that being able to eastablish secure channels is not incredibly difficult. We know where to go and what tools to use. 99.99% of the planet lacks this knowledge, and if secure communication is not built in to the tools they use then they will not even know what they are missing.
Facebook (and Messenger) is used in places where the wrong word can get you "dissappeared", and is used to organize events and movements that can have global consequences. Having a tool that enables you to easily establish a secure channel to someone else and know that if you destroy your device then no one, not even Facebook itself, can get the contents of your messages is a powerful thing. Even rubber-hose cryptography can't compromise you or the person you are communicating with.
A useful and easy to use tool like Messenger with this new capability can have profound effects, and knowing that they are using something like the OWS libs to make it all work rather than rolling their own or just giving up and saying that security and mass-market tools cannot co-exist is something I think should be encouraged rather than dismissed.