Signal, the CIA's wokest deepest state chat app
I know no one cares about opsec and privacy anymore, but bear with me…because I feel like I gotta comment on this given that I have such a long history with Signal and the whole gross, spooky world that underpins it.
So we got an inside look at how our dear leaders operate in private with the now-public Signal chat logs of them plotting a missile attack on Yemen and blasting out emoji high fives and fist bumps while innocent people are blown to bits and buried under rubble. Bullies with a global precision targeting system. Nothing more patriotic.
The funniest bit, as you know, is that Trump’s natsec adviser Michael Waltz accidentally added Atlantic editor-in-chief and former IDF prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg to the chat… Probably because Michael had been Jeffrey’s secret BFF source before and the two had been texting on the app? How cool is it that a super secure Signal messaging lets you loop in your “journalist” rumor dump in on a global missile strike?
Naturally America’s lib political establishment has been less interested in Trump’s attack on Yemen and more interested in security matters — they want to critique Trump from the Patriotic Right. WHAT DID TRUMP REVEAL TO OUR ENEMIES????!!!!!! HOW MANY AMERICAN LIVES WERE PUT AT RISK????? 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 SOMEONE MUST BE FIRED!!!! AND THEN WE CAN GO BACK TO BUSINESS AS USUAL. 👊🇺🇸🔥
So they made the story very much about Signal, the supposedly secure chat app that has been endorsed through the years by Edward Snowden, Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and others.
Longtime readers of mine know that I’ve been a critic of Signal going back a decade now…and have been on the receiving end of a lot of smears and dirt from that world. My criticism has had several different levels to it.
My first point has to do with Signal’s intriguing origin story. The short of it is that Signal was birthed by a CIA spinoff — ushered into the world with at least $3 million US government seed money before its funding was picked up by various oligarchic tech factions, including Elon Musk.1
You can read more about this spooky history here or in my book Surveillance Valley. But yeah, turns out the chat app that Edward Snowden claimed can protect you from the nefarious tentacles of the global American surveillance machine was created with money from this very same global surveillance machine, funneled through the old-school CIA front-group Radio Free Asia. That begs the question: Why would the USG security state fund an app that limited its own power to surveil? The answer: it wouldn’t.
An anarcho-anarchist like Moxie Marlinspike would never take CIA cutout money to make Signal. How un-rastafarian would that be?
And that brings us to point #2.
My second point is larger. It has to do with the fact that the entire internet runs on buggy code — on programs that are full of holes, constantly interfacing with other programs and systems that are also full of holes. I studied computer science at UC Berkeley a bit. I know how to program…even worked as an intern at a startup in my day. I know how this stuff works. And there are always lots of holes. The more complex a system, the more holes it has. And these holes are being watched more than all the holes on OnlyFans. Every government with global ambitions has entire agencies dedicated to discovering these holes and, eh, exploiting them. The U.S. government probably spends more money on this task than all the other governments in the world combined. And there are plenty of various shady private outfits — like the Israeli company Candiru, which boasts that it can crack Signal directly. So yeah, Signal is easily broken in a million different ways. And there have been plenty of examples that have been made public, going back to when Wikileaks released a CIA toolset that could get around encrypted chats. I’m sure there is a lot more than we can guess.
How bad is it? Well, consider this: I just went back and checked Signal’s latest tax filings, and it’s almost too funny… The app’s entire infrastructure is outsourced to other companies. Three of them — including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft — have billions in contracts with the Pentagon and the CIA and are fully integrated with America’s imperial security state. One of the companies that Signal runs on, Twilio, has recently been hacked and allowed Signal accounts to be compromised. So yeah…holes aplenty.
From Signal’s 2023 tax filing
My third point goes up one level of abstraction — to the level of politics.
To me the popularity of Signal — the fact that it has been pushed on us so much — comes out of a very specific political project.
You have to go back in history a little bit and remember that Signal was pushed on people during the Obama years, right after Edward Snowden’s revelations about how the NSA was spying on Americans in partnership with the largest Silicon Valley companies. The whole PRISM program…