Signal Messenger and Tor: Government Ops, Yasha Levine

[grarpamp]

https://yasha.substack.com/p/signal-is-a-government-op
https://yasha.substack.com/p/spy-funded-privacy-tools-like-signal

"Tor Stinks  -- NSA"

Links in original/archive


Signal is a government op
Signal was created and funded by a CIA spinoff. It is not your friend.
Yasha Levine
	Jan 16

Signal — the privacy chat app favored by the world’s leading crypto
experts — is trending again. In the wake of Twitter and Facebook’s
MAGA Maidan Internet purge (which was followed by Facebook’s
announcement that it was gonna start siphoning data off its WhatsApp
property), Signal shot up to being the top downloaded messenger app on
the planet.

The New York Times is writing about it. Edward Snowden is tweeting
about it, telling his fans that Signal is the only reason he’s able to
stay alive (and not the fact that he’s being protected round-the-clock
by Russia’s security apparatus.) Hell, Even Elon Musk is out there
telling people to go Signal. So many people are flooding the app that
it’s been crashing.
Twitter avatar for @elonmuskElon Musk @elonmusk
Use Signal

January 7th 2021
48,655 Retweets363,262 Likes

Given that the app is blowing up, I figure it’s a good time to roll
out my periodic public service announcement: Signal was created and
funded by a CIA spinoff. Yes, a CIA spinoff. Signal is not your
friend.

Here are the cold hard facts.

Signal was developed by Open Whisper Systems, a for-profit corporation
run by “Moxie Marlinspike,” a tall, lanky cryptographer who has a head
full of dreadlocks and likes to surf and sail his boat. Moxie was an
old friend of Tor’s now-banished chief radical promotor Jacob
Appelbaum, and he’s played a similar fake-radical game — although he’s
never been able to match Jake’s raw talent and dedication to the art
of the con. Still, Moxie wraps himself in air of danger and mystery
and hassles reporters about not divulging any personal information,
not even his age. He constantly talks up his fear of Big Brother and
tells stories about his FBI file.

So how big a threat is Moxie to the federal government?

This big: After selling his encryption start-up to Twitter in 2011,
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) — on
developing tech to fight Internet censorship abroad. That relationship
led to his next venture: a suite of government-funded encrypted chat
and voice mobile apps. Say hello to Signal.

If you look at Signal’s website today, you’ll find all sorts of
celebrity endorsements —  Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, and even Jack
Dorsey. You’ll also find a “donate” button — which, by the way, you
shouldn’t press because Signal has plenty of tech oligarch cash on
hand these days. What you won’t find is an “about” section that
explains Signal’s origin story — a story that involves several million
dollars in seed and development capital from Radio Free Asia, a CIA
spinoff whose history goes back to 1951 and involves all sorts of
weird shit, including its association in the 1970s with the Moonies,
the hardcore anti-communist Korean cult.

Exactly how much cash Signal got from the U.S. government is hard to
gauge, as Moxie and Open Whisper System have been opaque about the
sources of Signal’s funding. But if you tally up the information
that’s been publicly released by the Open Technology Fund, the Radio
Free Asia conduit that funded Signal, we know that Moxie’s outfit
received at least $3 million over the span of four years — from 2013
through 2016. That’s the minimum Signal got from the feds.

Three mil might not seem like much these days, especially because
Signal recently got a huge infusion of WhatsApp oligarch cash to keep
its operation going. But it’s important to know that without this
early U.S. government seed money, there would be no Signal today. And
that makes you think: If Signal’s super crypto tech truly posed a
threat to the feds and to our oligarchy’s power, why would the feds
bankroll its creation? And why would Facebook and Google rush to adopt
its super-secure protocols? H’mmmmm…

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. But Signal lives on and thrives, despite it being a
supposed threat to the almighty surveillance powers of the United
States of America.
Signal was seeded by this Radio Free Asia?

What is Radio Free Asia and the Open Technology Fund? And why would
the U.S government fund crypto tech like Signal? On top of that, why
would Silicon Valley — built as it is on for-profit surveillance —
embrace Signal’s supposedly unbreakable privacy tech?

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 bookstore. Or
you can check out some of the articles I’ve written on the topic over
the years. The mains ones are:

    In “The Crypto-Keepers: How the politics-by-app hustle conquered
all,” I do a profile on Telegram and survey the field of our tech
obsessed privacy culture and the bankrupt libertarian-neoliberal
politics that underpin it.

    In “Internet Privacy, Funded By Spies” I tell the history of the
U.S. government regime change apparatus that funds privacy apps like
Signal and Tor.

    In “#J20, Signal, spies and the cult of crypto” I riff on what
being obsessed with crypto says about our politics.

    Back in 2016, German magazine konkret published a wide-ranging
interview with me about spies, politics, and crypto culture.

But beyond just Signal and its government money trail, what interests
me are the politics embedded in our culture’s obsession with crypto
and privacy tech. People are obviously concerned about the
all-pervasive surveillance that surrounds us. But instead of seeking
political solutions to surveillance, our culture has become obsessed
with technological and technocratic solutions — not just Signal, but
apps like Telegram and email providers like ProtonMail.

There’s a feeling of an NRA fantasy to it all. It’s the idea that if
everyone is equipped with a crypto weapon powerful enough, we could
take on both corporations and powerful spy agencies like the NSA. We
can win this war! But cryptography is an area normally reserved for
warfare and espionage between powerful states. There’s nothing
grassroots about it. It’s an arena where this “people power” is
destined to fail.

Maybe using Signal and other “secure” apps can protect you from your
local police department if you’re buying molly off our neighborhood
dealer — that is, if the cops don’t get ahold of your phones. But if
you think you can win a privacy arms race against our imperial tech
oligarchy by using apps that are run and developed on property owned
and controlled by this very same imperial tech oligarchy…well, you
know the answer to that.

—Yasha Levine

PS: When I was working on my book, I found out through a FOIA request
that my early reporting on Tor and Signal immediately got the
attention of the top people in America’s regime change apparatus. That
included Libby Liu, the head of Radio Free Asia. She got freaked out
that my exposé on the millions in government funds that were flowing
to “grassroots” anti-government crypto tech like Signal and Tor was
going scare away the privacy community. Lucky for her and the U.S.
government, she was wrong. The top privacy activists of our age —
including the people from Tor — didn’t care that their main backer was
an old school CIA op. That’s what shocked me when I came across her
email. Here was the head of Radio Free Asia talking about privacy
activists as if they were all in the government’s pocket. And the
thing is, they were — and are.








Spy-funded privacy tools (like Signal and Tor) are not going to
protect you from the government
Ask yourself: Why would a CIA spinoff fund a grassroots encryption app?
Yasha Levine
	Nov 28, 2016	
2		
Art for Pando by Jeannette Langmead.

America’s in total turmoil following Donald Trump’s victory.

Nazis and white supremacists are suddenly in vogue, getting magazine
profiles and primetime TV spots. Bernie supporters are nervously
rejoicing — setting sights on taking over the Democratic Party, while
waiting for blacklists and payback.

Sad to say, but most of my journalist colleagues are in total meltdown
mode. Caught completely off-guard, they’re blaming everything from
fake news to Facebook to Macedonian teenager-entrepreneurs and nursing
wild theories about an underhanded plot by the Russians to hack voting
machines via infected USB dongles.

Meanwhile, lots of people seem to think that Trump’s victory
represents some kind of unique evil that has put America on fast track
to becoming Nazi Germany — forgetting our country’s long and dark
history of normalizing eugenicists, white supremacists and outright
Nazis for political ends. Look no further than Ukraine, welfare reform
and libertarians, just to name a few. And Trump’s cabinet picks are
bearing this continuity out: more and more, his is shaping up to be a
Charles Koch administration — you know, the richest man in the world,
who just so happens to fund white supremacists and Holocaust deniers.

The crypto community’s not letting a good crisis go to waste. Our
foremost privacy experts have seized on people’s fears and have been
churning out articles and how-to guides urging us to immediately
encrypt our digital lives in order protect ourselves from what they
say will be a Totalitarian Trump presidency.

“With Trump eager to misuse his power and get revenge on his perceived
enemies, it’s reasonable to conclude there will be a parallel increase
in abuse of power in law enforcement and the intelligence community,”
wrote Micah Lee, a technologist at The Intercept, owned by eBay
billionaire Pierre Omidyar. “Activists who put their bodies on the
line trying to protect basic rights — freedom of religion, freedom of
speech, civil rights, reproductive rights, voting rights, privacy
rights — will face the brunt of it.”

That sounds like a nightmare. And what’s the Intercept’s solution to
the Trump menace? Lee says there’s only one thing to do: encrypt your
computers and smartphones, host your websites in the dark web, browse
the Internet using Tor and communicate via Signal. In fact, he lashed
together a longwinded, five-page guide on the exact grassroots privacy
tech people need to use to safeguard their cyber property:

    “Surveillance Self-Defense Against the Trump Administration.”

     “…you should get everyone in your activist Facebook groups to
switch to an end-to-end encrypted group-messaging app, such as Signal,
WhatsApp…”

    “Everyone in your group will need to use Tor Browser…”

Lee’s post was shared thousands of times on Twitter and Facebook. And
his wasn’t the only one. Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and Medium are
awash with news articles and guides telling people to protect
themselves using Tor and Signal. Even Edward Snowden chimed in via
video link at the Real Future Fair in Oakland last week to tell people
political struggle won’t be enough to stop Trump’s totalitarianism and
that encryption was the answer.

“If you want to build a better future, you’re going to have to do it
yourself. Politics will take us only so far … Law is simply letters on
a page,” Ed told the conference, as reported by Matt Novak.“Technology
works differently than law. Technology knows no jurisdiction.” He then
added: “use Signal.”

Yep, forget collective action, forget politics. Use encryption apps.
Tech trumps everything in our fight for collective freedom.

Those who’ve followed my reporting on the Tor Project and the Internet
Freedom movementknow I think this advice isn’t just ridiculous and
dishonest, it’s downright dangerous — dangerous because it puts in
harm’s way the very people that these encryption and privacy apps are
supposed to protect.

The reason is simple, and can’t be repeated often enough: most of
today’s “grassroots” privacy technology pushed by privacy activists
like Lee and Snowden were created and continue to be controlled by the
very same U.S. military-intelligence apparatus these apps are supposed
to shield us from. I’m talking about the Pentagon (including the NSA),
the State Department and several CIA spinoff outfits that had been
covertly set up during the Cold War. In short, these tools are a part
of the very same state apparatus that will in just a few months be
under the control of President Donald Trump.

If this all sounds like a whack job conspiracy theory to you, then
you’re in for a rude awakening.

Let’s start with Tor.

Tor went mainstream in 2013, after Edward Snowden popped up on the
scene. He was a huge fan! His loyalty on full display in the first
pictures that emerged while he was in hiding in Hong Kong: a big fat
Tor sticker on his black laptop. After fleeing to Russia, he explained
that Tor was central to what he did, allowing him to exfiltrate
documents under the nose of the NSA. He also said Tor was good for
more than just protecting leakers and whistleblowers. He described it
as the best weapon people have to protect themselves against Internet
surveillance. “Without Tor, the streets of the Internet become like
the streets of a very heavily surveilled city,” he explained.

But there is something about Tor that Snowden held back from his fans.

Tor is made by the Tor Project, a nonprofit based in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. It is an Internet anonymity app that runs on your
computer and hides your identity as you browse the Internet. It can
also run Internet servers and make them accessible through the dark
web. In fact, the “dark web” almost exclusively runs on Tor, making
the service an integral part of a global network of illegal drug
marketplaces, child sex abuse pornography communities, ISIS hangout
spots and at least on crypto literary journal. The spooky thing about
Tor wasn’t that it allowed all this bad stuff to take place online,
but that it was almost entirely funded by the U.S. government.

Tor was initially developed by military researchers in the mid-1990s
at the U.S. Naval Laboratory in Washington D.C. It was spun off as a
quasi-independent nonprofit in 2004 but continued to receive most of
its funding through contracts coming from three branches of the U.S.
National Security State: the U.S. Navy, the State Department and the
Broadcasting Board of Governors, an old CIA spinoff set up during the
Cold War to wage psychological warfare and regime change ops against
countries deemed hostile to U.S. security and economic interests. To
date, Tor has received over $10 million in federal contracts. It even
has its own federal contractor number. (For funding details see here,
here and here.)

So why would the U.S. National Security State fund an app designed to
thwart its own power? Well, that’s a long story and fascinating story
— one that I’m addressing at length in my upcoming book “Surveillance
Valley.” But the quick answer is that Tor was created not to thwart
American power, but to enhance and multiply it.

Tor was developed by the U.S. Navy as a way of getting around the
problem of the open nature of Internet communication, which allows
anyone watching network traffic — ISPs, Google, spies — to see where
you are coming from and where you are going. Imagine a CIA agent
trying to log into their mail.cia.gov account while under cover in a
hotel in Ankara. Whoever was monitoring the spy’s connection would
immediately blow their cover. Internet architecture posed a problem
for spies and Tor was one of the solutions: It could hide where you’ve
coming from and where you are going on the Internet by bouncing your
connections around several nodes and obscuring your identity. The only
problem was that if only U.S. spies and agents used this system, then
it’s would have been very obvious that anyone connecting to Tor was a
spook. So in order for Tor to truly work, it needed to be opened up to
as many people as possible: not just spies but soccer moms, drug
dealers, terrorists, paranoid kids, activists, credit card scammers,
Russian spies — anybody. The bigger the crowd Tor had, the better it
could hide the spies used it. That’s why Tor was spun off from the
U.S. Navy and became a non-profit organization, but was still actively
used by the Pentagon, as well as the FBI.

As Tor matured, America’s foreign policy apparatus found another use
for its anonymity technology: regime change.

America runs a sprawling foreign propaganda operation that blankets
much of the world. Satellite, television and radio transmissions
beamed to Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe —
targeting countries deemed hostile to U.S. interests: Russia, China,
Cuba, Iran, Vietnam, North Korea, Venezuela. The idea behind it is the
same thing that the U.S. and Europe now accuse Russia of doing:
sponsoring news — some of it objective and very good, lots of it
ideologically distorted or simply fabricated — as part of a
destabilization and psychological warfare campaign. America has been
doing this non-stop for more than half a century, using propaganda to
complement grand plans of regime change.

During the Cold War, this propaganda was delivered mostly by radio
through outfits like Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia
— all of which were first set up and covertly run by the CIA. In the
2000s, the U.S. government began to use the Internet for these
propaganda efforts. After the collapse of the Soviet Union a big focus
was on China, so Radio Free Asia was brought back from the dead and
began to use the Internet. But China simply blocked the IP addresses
of Radio Free Asia’s websites. It was a pretty simple fix from China’s
perspective. So the U.S. government needed a technology that could
help the Chinese people to get around this censorship, and Tor offered
the best solution.

That’s when Tor started getting funding from the Broadcasting Board of
Governors, which is an umbrella federal agency that oversees all of
America’s foreign propaganda operations. While one part of the U.S.
military-intelligence apparatus used it to hide their tracks online,
another part started using it like a crowbar to pry open national
firewalls that prevented American propaganda from coming into
countries like China and Iran. From then on, Tor became a foreign
policy weapon, a soft power cyber weapon.

Today, Tor is private in name only. It's a federal weapons contractor
with its own federal contractor number and gets the bulk of its budget
via contracts from various wings of the U.S. National Security State:
the State Department, the Pentagon and the U.S. Navy and several CIA
spinoffs, including the Broadcasting Board of Governors and Radio Free
Asia.

Does Tor work? Don’t get your hopes up. Tor is a bit of a boondoggle.
It’s almost completely useless in countries like China or Iran that
actively try to block it. As for protecting people in the United
States from their own government? Well, the ACLA, EFF and even Edward
Snowden champion it as the most powerful anonymity tool on the
Internet. That may be true, but being the most powerful tool does not
necessarily make it secure against the U.S. National Security State.
As Tor developer Mike Perry admitted a few years back, Tor is not at
all effective against powerful, organized “adversaries” (aka
governments like the United States) that are capable monitoring huge
swaths of the Internet. “Extremely well funded adversaries that are
able to observe large portions of the Internet can probably break
aspects of Tor and may be able to deanonymize users,” he wrote.

And Tor’s been battered in a bad way in recent years — with so many
holes poked in it that it now looks like a log of Swiss cheese. Front
and center: a small group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University
had figured out a cheap and easy way to crack Tor’s super-secure
network with just $3,000 worth of computer equipment. The method was
then used by the FBI to mount an international raid that punched holes
in Tor’s defenses and shutdown several hundred anonymous drug and
kiddie porn markets.

There is one thing Tor does really well: it concentrates everyone who
has something to hide on its network. According to documents leaked by
Edward Snowden, this is the exact reason why the NSA does not want to
spook people away from Tor. It is also a reason why the NSA, along
with the GCHQ, run their own Tor nodes.

In short: if you’re looking to score a few grams of coke online, Tor
might shield you from the FBI and DEA — but only because they have
bigger suckers to bust. But if your political activities are in any
way perceived as a threat by the powers that be — well, I wouldn’t
trust Tor if I were you.

Despite all this, Tor is still being pushed by the likes of the
Intercept and all sorts of well-meaning organizations. For instance,
here is a DIY guide to feminist cybersecurity: “If you are ever in a
position where you absolutely NEED to be anonymous, be it for safety
or political reasons, then you need to use the Tor network.”

Yeah, good luck with that.

Then there’s Signal.

Signal is an encrypted chat app you can download for use on your
Android and iPhone. Like Tor, it went mainstream largely thanks to
Edward Snowden. Ed made the NSA’s surveillance of the Internet a
global concern and offered Signal as the best, free and easy-to-use
tool people could use to encrypt themselves against the NSA menace.

“Use anything by Open Whisper Systems,” Snowden told his followers,
referring to the outfit that makes Signal.

Snowden isn’t Signal’s only celebrity endorsement. Laura Poitras is a
huge fan, telling anyone who will listen:  “Signal is the most
scalable encryption tool we have. It is free and peer reviewed. I
encourage people to use it everyday.” Other Signal boosters include
respected encryption experts like Bruce Schneier and Matt Green. You
can find most of these endorsements right there on Open Whisper
System’s homepage. Without a doubt, Signal is hugely popular in the
privacy world — so popular that Facebook even integrated it into
WhatsApp’s encrypted chat mode.

As a result of all this promotion, Signal has become the communication
app of choice for political activists and protesters — from the Black
Lives Matter movement to people currently organizing the national #J20
anti-Trump strike planned for January 20th, Inauguration Day.

And why not use Signal, right?

Here’s the problem: Signal was created by the same spooky regime
change outfits that fund the Tor Project. The money primarily comes
through the federal government’s premier Internet Freedom venture
capital outfit: Open Technology Fund, which works closely with the
State Department’s regime change arm and is funded through several
layers of Cold War CIA cutouts — including Radio Free Asia and the
Broadcasting Board of Governors.

So what’s Signal story?

Here’s a quick rundown: The encrypted chat app — which can be
downloaded from Apple and Google’s stores for free — is built by Open
Whisper Systems (aka Quiet Riddle Ventures), an opaque for-profit
organization run by Moxie Marlinspike (not his real name). Marlinspike
likes to keep the details of his biography wrapped in mystery. He
poses as an anti-government radical in the mold of Jacob Appelbaum,
who selflessly works for the greater good, risking life and freedom
building super-secure communication technology powerful enough to
stand to the National Security Agency. It’s a nice story. The reality
is something different: Marlinspike made a bunch of money selling his
previous encryption startup to Twitter in 2011. Right after that, he
began partnering with America’s soft-power regime change apparatus —
including the State Department and the Broadcasting Board of Governors
— which led to them funding his next venture: a suite of encrypted
chat and voice mobile apps. Signal is a direct result of this project.

You won’t find it anywhere on Open Whisper System’s website, but
Signal depends on NatSec cash for continued survival. Exactly how much
cash is hard to gauge, as Open Whisper System refuses to disclose its
financing structure. But if you tally up documents released by Radio
Free Asia’s Open Technology Fund, we know Marlinspike’s outfit
received $2.26 million in the span of the past three years — not
exactly pocket change. And the NatSec cashflow shows no sign of
ending.

Signal, like Tor, is bankrolled by the soft-power wing of the U.S.
National Security State as part of a larger “Internet Freedom”
initiative — an attempt to leverage the Internet and digital
communication tools as a compliment to more traditional elements of
psychological warfare and regime change ops. The ideas behind
“Internet Freedom” go back to the origins of the commercial Internet,
but they began to be implemented in earnest during President Barack
Obama’s first term — led by Hillary Clinton’s State Department.

Hillary Clinton isn’t too Internet savvy, but she surrounded herself
by a bunch of gee-whiz cyber-democracy advisors who were sold on the
idea that the Internet is a magic technology that transforms everyone
that comes in contact with it into a happy, non-violent
democratic-consumer. To make world peace a reality, all you had to do
was unleash Silicon Valley on the world and let the for-profit
Internet work its magic.

With these geniuses whispering in her ear, Secretary Clinton made
Internet Freedom a central plank of her State Department tenure. To
her, it was not about regime change, but about helping people around
the world talk to one another. “We see more and more people around the
globe using the Internet, mobile phones and other technologies to make
their voices heard as they protest against injustice and seek to
realize their aspirations,” she said back in 2011. “So we’re focused
on helping them do that, on helping them talk to each other, to their
communities, to their governments and to the world.”

In reality, Internet Freedom was just war fought by other means.
Here’s a report by the New York Times from June 2011, right around the
time that Marlinspike began working with the State Department on
Internet Freedom efforts, which would grow later become Signal.

    The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy
“shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to
undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by
censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.

    The effort includes secretive projects to create independent
cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation
out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington,
where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a
garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a
prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”

     Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase
could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless
communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.

    The American effort, revealed in dozens of interviews, planning
documents and classified diplomatic cables obtained by The New York
Times, ranges in scale, cost and sophistication.

    Some projects involve technology that the United States is
developing; others pull together tools that have already been created
by hackers in a so-called liberation-technology movement sweeping the
globe.

    The State Department, for example, is financing the creation of
stealth wireless networks that would enable activists to communicate
outside the reach of governments in countries like Iran, Syria and
Libya, according to participants in the projects.

Ah yes. Look at Syria and Libya — models of democracy, where Al-Qaeda
and ISIS run wild and democracy’s a-flourishin’.

Aside from the geopolitical aspect of Internet Freedom technology, the
question is: Does Signal actually work? Certainly, lots of encryption
experts say its code is flawless. But then again, these experts have
been saying the same thing about Tor.

Signal runs on Amazon AWS cloud service — and Amazon is itself a CIA
contractor. Signal also requires that users tie their app to a real
mobile phone number (their identity) and give unrestricted access to
their entire address book (the identities of all their friends,
colleagues, fellow activists and organizers and sources). Troubling on
an even more fundamental level: Signal depends on Apple and Google to
deliver and install the app. As one respected security researcher
recently pointed out, this is a serious problem because both companies
partner with the NSA and can modify the app (at request of, say, the
NSA or CIA) without anyone getting wise.

“Google usually has root access to the phone, there’s the issue of
integrity. Google is still cooperating with the NSA and other
intelligence agencies. PRISM is also still a thing. I’m pretty sure
that Google could serve a specially modified update or version of
Signal to specific targets for surveillance, and they would be none
the wiser that they installed malware on their phones,” wrote Sander
Venema in a post called “Why I won’t be recommending Signal anymore.”

Yeah, that’s pretty troubling. Like Tor, Signal might work if you're
chatting with your local neighborhood dealer to score a few grams of
coke, but don’t expect it to protect you if you decide to do anything
really transgressive — like organizing against concentrated corporate
political power in the United States. For what it's worth, I
personally heard activists protesting the Democratic National
Convention in Philadelphia tell me that the cops seemed to know their
every move, despite the fact they were using Signal to organize.

The moral of this story: Tor and Signal are creations of America’s
spooky war apparatus. They are designed for regime change in the age
of the Internet. If they ever posed a threat to the United States —
and to the corporate monopoly power that calls the shots here — their
funding would be pulled and they would cease to exist. In short: if
you’re worried about corporate-state surveillance, technology funded
by this very same state is not the answer.

—Yasha Levine

PS: If you want to know more, read my book — Surveillance Valley.

Update: An earlier version of this story incorrectly described Open
Whisper Systems as a non-profit. It is, in fact, a for profit company.