Interesting food for thought.
I have a question regarding getting others on board. Imagine having a group of friends or colleagues, who are not interested in this stuff at all, and look at whatsapp and email as perfectly acceptable even if they would know it's being read by others.
"I'm not doing anything against the law, therefore they can know everything I do"
How would you go about convincing these people to use another secure app, at the cost of a lower availaibility to them. (And how do you get them all to use the same so that you do not need 8 different clients to communicate with your friends).
About the aggressive marketing of Telegram as secure whilst not being secure,... As a government, it looks to me like a good deal to have someone think he is safe while he is not. The Cracking of Enigma without the Germand knowing it probably shaved about 2 years off WWII...
Hi, @walkerlv :)
Controlling other people's behavior (which includes "convincing these people to use" and "get them all to use"...) is hard. It takes a lot of planning and forethought and often doesn't actually work. The entire field of security is effectively about controlling other people's behavior, and then cleaning up the mess when things don't go according to plan. :-P
That's why you see my strategy with this post wasn't to say "people should do X, and here's my credentials for why I'm qualified to say that," but was instead was "hey, here's a whole bunch of knowledge and info I've gained on this topic. Perhaps you haven't thought through this yet, so hopefully this gives you a head start and makes the topic a slightly higher priority on your mind now that you know enough to act." :-D Now for you and everyone else, always be wary of people doing that, since it's easy to manipulate people by only giving them particular information. But in general, if you want people to do things, help them understand why it's in their best interests, and then give them the knowledge that empowers them to act.
That will usually be enough, and they'll motivate themselves from there. If they don't, they probably don't yet see why it's in their best interests to act, so you've got to figure out how to connect this thing you care about with something they care about.
So as for the "I have nothing to hide" crowd, they're tricky because they're choosing to ignore reality. You could ask them why they trust the state, ask them to question whether the state in real life seems to be made up of the good people doing good things they associate with it, or is that just opinion formed from TV and marketing? But all of that is just as likely to bounce off because it challenges a more fundamental belief that they aren't willing to question. You've got to figure out what that deeper belief is, and fix that first. Once you've dug deep enough and found and eliminated the root lie, they'll fix everything after that on their own in time, as long as they don't adopt another lie along the way.
And yes, I strongly suspect Telegram as being in cahoots with malicious states, in an attempt to honeypot people into trusting as private an app which is intentionally designed to not be private from the state. The psychopathic level of their false advertising, and the kind of marketing they get from apparently unrelated organizations... Telegram was famous briefly for being used by a group of 'terrorists' to 'secure' their communications, which sounds like pure storytelling to me. It's exactly the same strategy for getting people to act that I used in this post. Think about that.
This had got to be the most elaborate and most thought out answer I ever received to a question on steemit.
Thank you for taking the time to do this. You make many excellent points, in the short run, I doubt I'll get people to switch from using email and whatsapp :)