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?
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.
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.
Strictly speaking, the social graph harvesting portion would be under the Google umbrella, as, IIRC, Signal relies on Google Play Services for delivering messages to recipients. Signal’s sealed sender and “allow sealed sender from anyone” options go part way to addressing this problem, but last I checked, neither of those options are enabled by default.
However, sealed sender on its own isn’t helpful for preventing build-up of social graphs. Under normal circumstances, Google Play Services knows the IP address of the sending and receiving device, regardless of whether or not sealed sender is enabled. And we already know, thanks to Snowden, that the feds have been vacuuming up all of Google’s data for over a decade now. Under normal circumstances, Google/the feds/the NSA can make very educated guesses about who is talking to who.
In order to avoid a build-up of social graphs, you need both the sealed sender feature and an anonymity overlay network, to make the IP addresses gathered not be tied back to the endpoints. You can do this. There is the Orbot app for Android which you can install, and have it route Signal app traffic through the Tor network, meaning that Google Play Services will see a sealed sender envelope emanating from the Tor Network, and have no (easy) way of linking that envelope back to a particular sender device.
Under this regime, the most Google/the feds/the NSA can accumulate is that different users receive messages from unknown people at particular times (and if you’re willing to sacrifice low latency with something like the I2P network, then even the particular times go away). If Signal were to go all in on having client-side spam protection, then that too would add a layer of plausible deniability to recipients; any particular message received could well be spam. Hell, spam practically becomes a feature of the network at that point, muddying the social graph waters further.
That Signal has
- Not made sealed sender and “allow sealed sender from anyone” the default, and
- Not incorporated anonymizing overlay routing via tor (or some other network like I2P) into the app itself, and
- Is still in operation in the heart of the U.S. empire
tells me that the Feds/the NSA are content with the current status quo. They get to know the vast, vast majority of who is talking (privately) to who, in practically real time, along with copious details on the endpoint devices, should they deem tailored access operations/TAO a necessary addition to their surveillance to fully compromise the endpoints and get message info as well as metadata. And the handful of people that jump through the hoops of
- Enabling sealed sender
- Enabling “allow sealed sender from anyone”
- Routing app traffic over an anonymizing overlay network (and ideally having their recipients also do so)
can instead be marked for more intensive human intelligence operations as needed.
Finally, the requirement of a phone number makes the Fed’s/the NSA’s job much easier for getting an initial “fix” on recipients that they catch via attempts to surveil the anonymizing overlay network (as we know the NSA tries to). If they get even one envelope, they know which phone company to go knocking on to get info on where that number is, who it belongs to, etc.
This too can be subverted by getting burner SIMs, but that is a difficult task. A task that could be obviated if Signal instead allowed anonymous sign-ups to its network.
That Signal has pushed back hard on every attempt to remove the need for a phone number tells me that they have already been told by the Feds/the NSA that that is a red line, and that, should they drop that requirement, Signal’s days of being a cushy non-profit for petite bourgeois San Francisco cypherpunks would quickly come to an end.
Anyone who has any experience with centralized databases, would be able to tell you how useless sealed sender is. With message recipients and timestamps, it’d be trivial to discover who the senders are.
Also, signal has always had a cozy relationship with the US (radio free asia was it’s initial funder) . After yasha levine posted an article critical of signal a few years back, RFA even tried to do damage control at a privacy conference on signal s behalf:
Libby Liu, president of Radio Free Asia stated:
Our primary interest is to make sure the extended OTF network and the Internet Freedom community are not spooked by the [Yasha Levine’s] article (no pun intended). Fortunately all the major players in the community are together in Valencia this week - and report out from there indicates they remain comfortable with OTF/RFA.
These are high-up US government employees trying to further spread signal.
You can read more about this here.
Cross referenced you on the sister thread.
People there positing that this is no correct. Granted their info appears to be signal “disclosed” to the feds as part of a court proceed what it collects, which is only apparently when you connect to the server.
Doesnt answer the issue if they could collect your call logs though
My reply from the other thread. People who claim this isn’t true aren’t being honest. The phone number is the key metadata. Meanwhile, nobody outside the people who are actually operating the server knows what it’s doing and what data it retains. Faith based approach to privacy is fundamentally wrong. Any data that the protocol leaks has to be assumed to be available to adversaries.
Furthermore, companies can’t disclose if they are sharing data under warrant. This is why the whole concept of warrant canary exists. Last I checked Signal does not have one.
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).
I hope they don’t arrest them too.
She has her hand in too many strategic places, unlike Telegram.
employed at Google for 13 years
speaker at the 2018 World Summit
written for the American Civil Liberties Union
advised the White House, the FCC, the FTC, the City of New York, the European Parliament, and many other governments and civil society organizations
The very fact that there have never been any attempts in the west to stop Signal from operating says volumes in my opinion.
Not that the action against Telegram is right, but there’s a big difference between what Signal and Telegram is doing.
Telegram is available on F-Droid. Signal is not. Whatever is Signal doing, it’s pretty bad.
Would you have more info on the differences? I was wondering the same thing, but I don’t know enough about Telegram to compare
Signal always responds to authorities when they ask for data, and they give them all they have: the day they registered, their phone number and the timestamp they last used the app.
Telegram has unencrypted channels of drug dealing, and what I heard is a lot of illegal porn too. The authorities want information on certain users there and Telegram doesn’t comply. This is directly against the law Signal is not breaking, because they always send all the data they have to the law enforcement.
Telegram is a propaganda weapon in some sense, between two worldviews - one is “a good service doesn’t require trust, because they physically can’t sell you”, another is “a good service you can trust because they won’t sell you”. And Telegram helps the latter.
So frankly - kill it with fire. Sadly I’m in Russia and everybody uses it here.
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.
