Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

I looked into the Silk Road story again and it looks like I was misremembering how they caught DPR, but splitting your "personally identifiable" and other browsing is still a good idea.

Let's say you use the Tor browser to browse some regular (non-Tor) site that is illegal in your country for whatever reason. But let's say you then remember you still haven't paid your taxes so you open a new tab and quickly go do that. But you're still in the Tor browser, so your e-banking traffic is going out the same exit node as your "illegal" traffic. Now, anyone that saw both of those things come out of the same node can conclude that it's somewhat likely both were done by the same person. If that someone is the government, they can get access logs from your bank and see which account was accessed by the exit node's IP. The more times you do this, the stronger the link between you personally and the illegal site is.

Of course, doing your taxes through the same Tor session is something most people would know to not do, but if your entire device is tunneled through Tor, you no longer have a say in what data it leaks. Your banking app probably sends requests periodically in the background to check for updates or whatever, your email client syncs your emails, etc. If any one of those services can be coerced by your government (and chances are they can) then whatever illegal things you do in that session can be loosely linked to you. I say loosely, because there are many people on one exit node, but the data points start adding up after a while (and depending on the insanity of your leaders, just being on the list of candidates might be enough to disappear you).

As for how they would get that metadata in the first place, there are a few ways. The exit node might be under their jurisdiction, but since we're talking about bypassing censorship, it certainly isn't. They could also have compromised the "illegal" server (hacked/coerced/honeypot...), in which case it's just a matter of cross-referencing the site's logs with anything they can get their hands on (and if the government is authoritarian enough, they probably already have access to a lot). The last option is compromising the exit node, which is also not impossible. There's nothing stopping your government from setting up a thousand Tor exit nodes and logging all the metadata. If you're constantly running Tor, chances are you land on one of their exit nodes eventually.

DISCLAIMER: the above was probably a bit too paranoid, but as I have zero experience hiding from an authoritarian government, I'm not in a position to judge how much paranoia is justified. It's entirely possible that none of this applies because your specific adversary doesn't employ these specific de-anonymization tactics, but that is something you need to know for your specific situation. I assumed an "everything is fucked" threat model here, but yours might not be as severe and other types of mitigations might be more appropriate.

Why are you in favor of sanctions on Iran? I've never really heard a good argument. It mostly tends to be "Well they say things I don't like that scare me, like Death to America" so very anti free speech type arguments.

I think you will have a problem when it comes to push notifications. I doubt a local build would be able to receive push notifications addressed to App Store builds.

This is why the mindset that no body will leave whatsapp or social media is very detrimental and erroneous. Even if a few 1000 tech savy users use distributed communication that looks like regular traffic all the time, then when an event like this where governement shuts down all main stream social media happens, people will be forced to learn about distributed communication and mass transformation will happen.

I don't understand the point of reinventing many wheels. Why not build a friendly chat app on top of established onion routing protocols (Tor/I2P), or add your own onion routing backend (proxy) to established federated chat apps like Conversations, which already has perfect Tor integration for Jabber/XMPP over .onion servers?

Also, Session is promoted as a non-profit project, but following links around about LokiNet and Oxen you find out about a blockchain-based cryptocurrency, which is known to be an anti-pattern on many levels (though they use Proof-of-Service not Proof-of-Work which is slightly less worse).

Finally, Session appears to be free-software (good), but is not distributed on F-Droid, the only privacy/security-friendly app store for Android. They encourage you to download random APKs from Google Play (which requires Google Play Services malware and a google account) or Github (owned by Microsoft, though i note they sign checksums with PGP on Github so it's safer to download from there than Google Play, even though they don't provide instructions on how to verify signatures). On F-Droid, they could either have F-Droid build/distribute the package with Fdroid's PGP key, or open their own F-Droid repo with their own PGP key (like Newpipe did), or both.

I really appreciate their communication around dissent and the need to protect communications to help the people against their governments. However these three points i just noted are really shady to say the least. I understand they need to please investors to put money in their fridges, however trying to mix for-profit incentives with non-profit services to the communities is always a dead-end.