Put on your tinfoil hats people, from now on we communicate with pgp encrypted pigeon mail.
Signal Is a Government Op
21–30 of 61 posts
Re: Signal Is a Government Op
#22I can absolutely see the objectives of US foreign policy (enable citizens of foreign powers to evade domestic surveillance) conflicting with domestic policy (bulk communications collection).
It doesn’t necessarily compromise Signal, but simply highlights that government isn’t always internally efficient or consistent.
Re: Signal Is a Government Op
#23Such a lazy "article". How many audits have Open Technology Fund bankrolled? Are all those companies "Linked to Government". Seriously, it reads like someone who found that RFA started OTF and wants to ride the "Signal = bad" wave. Literally, zero value.
Re: Signal Is a Government Op
#24Yasha has published rubbish trying to link the Open Tech Fund/Radio Free Asia to the CIA for years. It's not. To be honest he continues to be pushing such dangerous false conspiracy theories that risk real people, doing real work. I work on Umbrella ( https://www.secfirst.org ), a free open source project to help journalists and activists learn about and manage digital and physical security. It was initially funded b…
I'm not sure what you are saying here. That Open tech fund is not related to the CIA or to Radio Free Asia or that Radio free Asia is not related to the CIA? There's no doubt what agenda Radio Free Asia has and who runs it (U.S. Agency for Global Media). Something doesn't have to be directly under the CIA to do their bidding (that would be real bad spy agency work).
>Why would I or anyone of the other hundreds of projects, work with OTF if somehow it was a CIA front?
Im not saying they are or aren't (I have no idea) but how would you know if the CIA were behind something if they didn't tell you?
Re: Signal Is a Government Op
#25> Signal was developed by Open Whisper Systems, a for-profit corporation run by “Moxie Marlinspike,”
- OWS was disolved for one. Signal is now developed by the "Signal Foundation" which is a registered 501(c)(3)non-profit. - Brian Acton (ex-WhatsApp) paid $50m startup money also
> Moxie began partnering with America’s soft-power regime change apparatus — including the State Department and the Broadcasting Board of Governors (now called the U.S. Agency for Global Media)
- So what. The Senate has literally approved Signal for use as a means of communication. - The US Govt. is not unified by any stretch of the imagination, there are plenty of competing interests. Some agencies want to support freedom of information, some want to suppress it.
This smells like a hit-piece. Also, both the client and server source-code is freely available for review and has been reviewed independently.... https://proprivacy.com/privacy-service/review/signal Realistically only the client matters, as it promises end-to-end encryption regardless of how secure/non-secure transport is.
The NSA etc doesn't need to "buy" apps in this manner anyway. They just go to the manufacturer of the devices/chips/components, throw them a National Security Letter and get ring-0 exploits (or hack their way in).
Re: Signal Is a Government Op
#26> As you can see from the way Parler was shutdown last week — when our imperial oligarchy wants to cancel an app, it can do so instantly and with a vengeance. I was not under the impression that Parler was shut down by the government, but more by the "cancel crowd". Was it a government operation ? As for the article, it seems the main arguments are that : - Signal was financed by Radio Free Asia (US government propag…
Correct, government did not force Parler to shut down. > If the crypto was effectively unbreakable, it would not be recommended by big companies like FB, Google, etc... This claim falls apart given that Google started encrypting traffic on private links after learning of us gov snooping on their traffic. Also, why would Google care about breaking signal traffic at all?
This assumes that the NSA and CIA are partners, not adversaries.
Re: Signal Is a Government Op
#27At the end of the page, after some unsubstantial conspiracy hints, all that's left is: > I’ve written at length about the deeper history of Signal’s government backers and the way in which crypto fits into America’s imperial machine. In fact, I dedicated two whole chapters of my book to the subject. I won’t reprint it here. But if you want to know the whole story, you can pick up Surveillance Valley at your local boo…
Which I believe violates HN rules
Re: Signal Is a Government Op
#28I’ve tried Signal multiple times but after Telegram it’s like moving from Facebook to MySpace from 2004. No, thank you. I’m kinda surprised people are not annoyed by Signal or WhatsApp and keep using them, to me they’re simply unbearable.
I want to like Telegram, I really do. But even with the "privacy" settings as strict as possible, I get unsolicited messages from random strangers at all hours of the day with no ability to mute them. I get 2-3 of these messages per day on both of my Telegram accounts. I don't know how anyone can consider Telegram private or trustworthy.
Re: Signal Is a Government Op
#29For an article with "Here are the cold hard facts" I wanted to put [citation needed] on quite a lot of claims. I also feel like mentioning to the author the Internet is also a government op if we go that way.
“The internet is a government op to spy on the populace” does appear to be the synopsis of the authors book, linked at the end of the post. So I suspect this post is really just an elaborate bit of spam.
It’s pretty much an ad for the book.
This post can pretty much be boiled down to “Open Whisper Systems received 3 million in funding from Radio Free Asia, therefore its a government op.”
The argument is standing upon legs composed of two individual twigs, shaky and weak would be an understatement.
Re: Signal Is a Government Op
#30I’ve tried Signal multiple times but after Telegram it’s like moving from Facebook to MySpace from 2004. No, thank you. I’m kinda surprised people are not annoyed by Signal or WhatsApp and keep using them, to me they’re simply unbearable.
It's as simple as: WA and Signal (same protocol) are believed to be still the publicly available state of art in e2ee (by default) consumable by your average person. Telegram has an opt-in setting for e2ee in specific contexts, otherwise you can assume your conversations are slurped by some agency (telegram also has some government-approved versions).
That's even before we get into their past security issues / breaches. From security/privacy point of view it's really not better.