> Today, Ryan Singel, the editor at Wired's Threat Level
> blog responded to my blog post, but incorrectly frames
> my criticism as if it were solely directed at Quinn
> Norton and her coverage of Cryptocat.
Considering about half of your original article was strictly discussing Norton's coverage, I can see where he got that idea. Then your original piece includes this bit:
> It isn't clear why Norton felt it wasn't necessary to
> publish any dissenting voices. From her public Tweets,
> it is however, quite clear that Norton has no love for
> the crypto community, which she believes is filled
> with "privileged", "mostly rich 1st world white boys
> w/ no real problems who don't realize they only build
> tools [for] themselves."
That's an attack on the author, don't you think? You just implied she neglected to include any criticism of the tool because she hates the crypto community. Not only does this illustrate your lack of understanding the concept of privilege, but it's rude and unnecessary, so I don't blame Ryan for taking offense.
For starters, Quinn wasn't trying to bury facts— the paragraph about how Cryptocat is an experiment is directly above the screenshot of the app, so it's fairly noticeable.
Second, your section titled "On the issue of privilege" doesn't actually talk about privilege. It talks about how two white men were stopped at the border to the US and one who had some of his devices seized. Her tweet was stating that maybe tools made by white men in first-world countries might not be able to adequately address the needs of less fortunate individuals under oppressive regimes.
So sure, it's great to call out projects that seem Too Good To Be True™, but multiple times you drew attention to Quinn's specific article, and even once needlessly quoted a few of her tweets. I don't see that attention paid to any other reporter, so Ryan's rebuttal is mostly on point.
(Shrug) Quinn effectively attacked and discredited herself by posting that Tweet. It's fair to bring it up when suggesting that she might not be the most qualified person to write articles on subjects related to cryptography and information security.
If there are any subjects that don't benefit from uninformed opinions posted by dilettantes, cryptography and security would be near the top of the list.
I don't know if I'd put it quite that way. It is an attack on the author, but attacks are not automatically invalid. We must ask the question "Was Soghoian's attack legitimate?"
I could comfortably answer yes. Soghoian could not come up with a reasonable explanation for Quinn's decision to not publish criticisms of the program. He therefore hypothesized that the author simply did not respect the people offering the criticism. He then produced a quote from Quinn which would support that hypothesis. If Soghoian were incorrect in that assessment, the Wired response should have pointed that out.
We must also realize that this means Soghoian isn't quite right in claiming his first criticism was about tech news in general. He did specifically criticize Wired, and therefore Wired is well within its rights to respond. Wired's allegations of sexism, however, was definitely not legitimate.
> Quinn effectively attacked and discredited herself by
> posting that Tweet.
That comes off rather victim-blamey. Nothing about what she tweeted paints her as ill-informed. In fact, quite the opposite: I would argue the crypto community is very privileged. It requires higher level education in a STEM field and access to modern computers.
Since we have that sorted out, can we then come to the core point of your argument here? Namely, what does this have to do with bad or good crypto?
Cryptography is math. Its no soft science where someone can push his agenda through careful interpretation of statistics. The background of the people researching it is irrelevant.
But none of that is important. Important is what happens when you use terrible crypto in a terrible country: your data will be siphoned off at the backend and western IT people with the same high level education will trivially decipher it.
And that is why its necessary to criticize people pushing magic crypto systems. It literally kills!
Well, the background of crypto researchers was core to Quinn's "privilege" tweet. That's one of the points the OP author touched on in his response-response, so it was relevant here.
And of course it's necessary to scrutinize people pushing crypto systems or tools that claim to do something no one has been able to do before! That's not what the Wired post was about, though. It was about how the OP author specifically targeted the Wired piece's author and made it seem like she was either too incompetent to write an article about Cryptocat or that she wrote the article because she hates the crypto community (still don't understand how he came to that conclusion.)
The concept of "privilege" as used in social justice speak is merely a tool used to discredit people who are in the wrong demographic/social/cultural categories without having to address the content of their arguments. And pointing this out is labeled "derailing", to avoid having to address that line of argument either.
I'm sure someone, somewhere has used the concept of privilege to unfairly discredit another person's opinion, but I think you're trying to apply cold, hard reasoning to something that requires deeper thought. Privilege, when used in social justice, refers to an area where one person has an advantage and another person belonging to a different group does not. If you need help understanding the concept, take a few minutes to read this excellent post on the subject: https://sindeloke.wordpress.com/2010/01/13/37/
This doesn't mean a white person can never talk about race. It means they need to understand they're coming from an entirely different perspective— a perspective that has the upper hand. Social justice covers topics that are inherently complex and might not conform to strict models and theories. This means where an argument comes from has a lot of bearing on its validity. That white person from earlier can participate, but they have to understand they've been living in a world where they get a head start, and often times, they have no idea when that world is giving it to them.
Anyway, that was a bit of a rant, so please read the blog post I linked to get a better idea.
For starters, Quinn wasn't trying to bury facts— the paragraph about how Cryptocat is an experiment is directly above the screenshot of the app, so it's fairly noticeable.
Second, your section titled "On the issue of privilege" doesn't actually talk about privilege. It talks about how two white men were stopped at the border to the US and one who had some of his devices seized. Her tweet was stating that maybe tools made by white men in first-world countries might not be able to adequately address the needs of less fortunate individuals under oppressive regimes.
So sure, it's great to call out projects that seem Too Good To Be True™, but multiple times you drew attention to Quinn's specific article, and even once needlessly quoted a few of her tweets. I don't see that attention paid to any other reporter, so Ryan's rebuttal is mostly on point.