The reason we "actively seek out partnership with govt/LE" is simply because they are by far the primary customer segment who actually have an clear need for self-hosted interoperable end-to-end encrypted communication and are willing to pay for it. If we don't find organisations who are willing to pay Element for services, then quite simply we can't pay people to work on Matrix and Element as their dayjob, and the whole thing would switch into best-effort volunteer run activity (although I'd presume most of the team would feel pretty burnt if that happened and go spend their freetime on something else). About 80% of Element's revenue comes from public sector, and without it the project simply wouldn't exist.
Hopefully, eventually, the rest of the world will wake up to the fact that sleepwalking into using Teams and Slack (or WhatsApp) is a catastrophe in the making. It's only a matter of time before someone publishes a torrent of every line of Teams scrollback or Slack scrollback for some high-profile organisation; the breach has probably already happened; the breacher is just waiting for the best strategic moment to drop the information bomb.
But until then, Element makes payroll by selling to folks like the French and German Governments, the United Nations, etc. They pick Element because it is high trust, and they can audit it and run it themselves. And there is categorically no way that I or other senior management at Element would destroy the company (let alone Matrix) by breaking that trust by letting someone undermine its privacy.
Separately: I'm literally years overdue in publishing Element's internal ethics guidelines publicly, which spells out precisely who we do and don't do business with. For what it's worth, the high level summary is:
* We don't sell to criminals (under UK/US/EU law)
* We don't sell to sanctioned (by UK/US/EU) or abusive govts or organisations
* We don't sell to orgs who explicitly encourage use which goes against our terms of service.
Our definition of abusive governments/orgs are those who commit human rights abuses or, who commit international atrocities (as defined by the UN), or contracts which primarily support the above.
Most western governments (including their police forces) do not fall into this bracket.
Hopefully, eventually, the rest of the world will wake up to the fact that sleepwalking into using Teams and Slack (or WhatsApp) is a catastrophe in the making. It's only a matter of time before someone publishes a torrent of every line of Teams scrollback or Slack scrollback for some high-profile organisation; the breach has probably already happened; the breacher is just waiting for the best strategic moment to drop the information bomb.
But until then, Element makes payroll by selling to folks like the French and German Governments, the United Nations, etc. They pick Element because it is high trust, and they can audit it and run it themselves. And there is categorically no way that I or other senior management at Element would destroy the company (let alone Matrix) by breaking that trust by letting someone undermine its privacy.
Which is why we're in the surreal situation of on one hand selling to the UK Government, while also frantically criticising them for the catastrophic idiocy of the Online Safety Bill: https://element.io/blog/the-online-safety-bill-an-attack-on-....
Separately: I'm literally years overdue in publishing Element's internal ethics guidelines publicly, which spells out precisely who we do and don't do business with. For what it's worth, the high level summary is:
Our definition of abusive governments/orgs are those who commit human rights abuses or, who commit international atrocities (as defined by the UN), or contracts which primarily support the above.Most western governments (including their police forces) do not fall into this bracket.