Signal Is More Than Encrypted Messaging. Under Meredith Whittaker, It’s Out to Prove Surveillance Capitalism Wrong

I hope they don't arrest them too.

This is a very rude question, but on this subject of being lean, I looked up your 990, and you pay yourself less than … well, you pay yourself half or a third as much as some of your engineers.

Yes, and our goal is to pay people as close to Silicon Valley’s salaries as possible, so we can recruit very senior people, knowing that we don’t have equity to offer them. We pay engineers very well. [Leans in performatively toward the phone recording the interview.] If anyone’s looking for a job, we pay very, very well.

But you pay yourself pretty modestly in the scheme of things.

I make a very good salary that I’m very happy with.

That's pretty cool. But knowing the number would matter.

As a happy user of Signal (no bugs or incidents from my viewpoint), I regardless chime in to say a word for decentralization. :)

Signal is centralized:

• there is a single Signal implementation, with a single developing entity
• you have to install its mobile version before you may run the desktop version

There exist protocols like Tox which go a step beyond Signal and offer more freedom -> have multiple clients from diverse makers (some of them unstable), don't have centralized registration, and don't rely on servers to distribute messages - only to distribute contact information.

In the grand comparison table of protocols (not clients), Tox is among the few lines that's all green (Signal has one red square).

This is the same Meredith Whittaker doing interviews with US defense-department aligned sites like LawFare.

Why are all these big tech sites like wired so interested in pushing signal anyway?

Signal's hostility to third party clients is a huge red flag.

They also refuse to distance themselves from Google's app store.

Isn’t Signal at least partially funded by the agency?

Signal is compleletly compromised through spell check on 99% of OEM smart devices. Spell check can see what your typing word by word, and signal uses it. Feds are 100% using spell check to view your private messages. And by feds I mean every government on earth with a computer.

The thing I hate about signal is the UI. Everything looks way too big on my device. WhatsApp, for example, holds 2 more chats, and the messages themselves are tidier.

This may seem like it's not a big deal, but UI is absolutely crucial on order to get people to actually use the app. I moved a few people to signal but they just hated the way it looks. "seems like an app for old people, font too big". I can see that. They moved back to insta/WhatsApp.

I think some small and easy UI changes could make the app much better: just give us a "compact" mode.

Yeah, Signal is more than encrypted messaging it's a metadata harvesting platform. It collects phone numbers of its users, which can be used to identify people making it a data collection tool that resides on a central server in the US. By cross-referencing these identities with data from other companies like Google or Meta, the government can create a comprehensive picture of people's connections and affiliations.

This allows identifying people of interest and building detailed graphs of their relationships. Signal may seem like an innocuous messaging app on the surface, but it cold easily play a crucial role in government data collection efforts.

Also worth of note that it was originally funded by CIA cutout Open Technology Fund, part of Radio Free Asia. Its Chairwoman is Katherine Maher, who worked for NDI/NED: regime-change groups, and a member of Atlantic Council, WEF, US State Department Foreign Affairs Policy Board etc.

0% chance that the feds don't have Signal backdoors, otherwise Wired wouldn't be promoting it. fyi everyone Proton is CIA. It's modern cryptoAG.

Ppl just gone use it to cheat smh