In March of this year, Meredith Whittaker was at her kitchen table in Paris when Signal, the encrypted messaging service she runs, suddenly became an international headline. A colleague sent their group chat the story ricocheting across the globe: “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans.”
Of course, you know the rest: In the piece, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, detailed how he’d been added to a Signal chat about an upcoming military operation in Yemen. Over the following days and weeks, the incident would become known as “SignalGate”—and created a legitimate risk that the fallout would cause people to question Signal’s security, instead of pointing their fingers at the profoundly dubious op-sec of senior-level Trump officials.
That never happened. In fact, Signal’s user numbers grew by leaps and bounds, both in the US and around the world. It’s growth that, Whittaker thinks, is coming at a time when “people are feeling in a much deeper, much more personal way why privacy might be important.”
On this week’s episode of The Big Interview, I talked to Whittaker, who also cofounded the AI Now Institute, about the aftermath of SignalGate, the trajectory of artificial intelligence, and the tech industry’s current relationship with politics.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Meredith Whittaker, welcome to The Big Interview.
MEREDITH WHITTAKER: Nice to see you, Katie.
Nice to see you, too. Brace yourself, we always start these conversations with a little warmup, so I’m going to ask you some very fast questions. Ready?
I am.
OK. Mountains or beach?
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