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“Signal is being blocked in Venezuela and Russia. The app is a popular choice for encrypted messaging and people trying to avoid government censorship, and the blocks appear to be part of a crackdown on internal dissent in both countries…”
“Signal is being blocked in Venezuela and Russia. The app is a popular choice for encrypted messaging and people trying to avoid government censorship, and the blocks appear to be part of a crackdown on internal dissent in both countries…”
Yeah. Telegram, should be next, there’s a huge risk with it too. And email! Social networks too, just in case. And postal mail, we can’t forget that. We should crack down any form of uncensored communication.
All for the benefit of the people, of course. \s
I mean signal was funded in part by the US intelligence community up until last year.
The current president of Signal is also still happy to do interviews with US-defense-oriented think tanks like Lawfare.
They probably still are funded by USIntel, considering how interested RFA was in pushing Signal in privacy-oriented spaces.
Unrelated to what the previous person is saying (banned because it was used by dissidents), but still, we have the source code. If you’re arguing they are somehow accessing the data, what’s encrypted and what isn’t is known.
Signal knows who you are taking to. You can build a network of contacts based on that information. When you send messages your phone number is protected but your ip address is not, and the receivers phone number is not protected. So you can find two people chatting based on that information. The app automatically sends a delivery receipt when a message is received to the other user, exposing the senders phone number and IP address.
However, opposition in the country is backed by western agencies and NGOs, and likely their primary means of communication is signal since it’s backed by western intelligence, meaning, western actors believe it to be safe from external interference.
I’m not arguing that the west is reading messages. I’m arguing that they believe it’s a safe haven for their agents because they pay money to ensure it’s safe for their agents. If it wasn’t, they wouldn’t use it. Its the same reason why the intelligence community in the west is a large supporter of the tor network. They use it in the field and operate their own exit nodes to protect their operations.
That’s what you fail to understand. It’s open source, it has been audited. Venezuela and any other country can check and crack the encryption if has holes in it. The long first paragraph is something that’s not a secret, but widely known.
You know what’s also safe? Encrypted emails. VPNs. Matrix.
If you think this is a movement against foreign agents, you should think it’s useless too. For a sufficiently motivated agent, this will be trivial to overcome. For the general population? Not so much.
Unless next all forms of private communication re forbidden, of curse. Surely what people on a privacy community advocate for.
well, except for all the times Signal just “forgets” to update the published source code of a year or so. Other than that its perfectly open source
Self defense is self defense, would we expect some different behavior from a country being attacked from outside interests with publicly accessible end to end encryption services?
Publicly accessible: reviewed and audited by hundreds of teams that confirmed there’s no backdoor. Venezuelan, Russian and Chinese governments didn’t find the holes, even having access to the code. If they did, they would be exploiting it to… reeducate.
Yeah, I would expect to trust that. Still, you said yourself, the problem is that is used by dissidents. And we can’t have that, right?
Open source, except when they do not publish it. Funded incredibly heavily buy the United States Intelegency Agencies. That would be more than enough to raise red flags for any nation that is not on the best terms with the United States.
Signal in all likelyhood is a honey pot
Funded by the US? Well thats the entire internet, including Tor, Linux and Matrix…
Amazing how much BS is spread here
The server is arguably more important, that is where the data and meta data itself are stored. Linux has never hid its source code for a year, and matrix can be self hosted.
I mean if you want to trust a honey pot go right ahead
Your claim about it being a honey pot is entirely baseless. There is a significantly better chance you are working for the US to prevent people from using signal…
Yes because the US does not want you useing a central server in its jurisdiction so it can force the organistation to give out all the meta data while not being alowed to alert anyone. How dare you use something that could give the US so much information in one easy package
You clearly have no clue how the internet or signal works. There is no information on signal servers that arent already available through the telcos, litterally zero
We can’t have individual thinkers running around can we. We need a shared vision that is dictated from the top down.