Signal Facing Collapse After CIA Cuts Funding

This article is ahistoric and unnecessarily conspirational.

Signal and its predecessors like TextSecure have been run by different companies/organizations:

Whisper Systems
Open Whisper Systems
Signal Technology Foundation (and its subsidiary Signal Messenger LLC)

Open Whisper Systems received about 3M USD total from the US government via the Open Technology Fund for the purpose of technology development … during 2013 to 2016. Source: archive of the OTF website: https://web.archive.org/web/20221015073552/https://www.opentech.fund/results/supported-projects/open-whisper-systems/

The Signal Foundation (founded 2018) was started by an 105M USD interest free loan from Brian Acton, known for co-founding WhatsApp and selling it to Facebook (now Meta).

So important key insights:

It doesn't seem like the Signal Foundation received US government funding. (Though I haven't checked financial statements.)
The US government funding seems to be a thing of the fairly distant past (2016). The article makes it sound like the funding was just pulled this year.
The US government funding was small compared to Signal's current annual budget. It was not small at the time, but now Signal regularly makes more from licensing its technology than it regularly received from the US government. According to ProPublica, Signals financial statements for 2022 indicate revenue of about 26M USD

Thank you for sharing this!
One question: how can the loan from Brian Acton be interest free? I thought the federal government imposed minimum interest rates to prevent people from bypassing tax-free gifting limits.
- deleted
It doesn’t seem like the Signal Foundation received US government funding
The article doesn't say that Signal Foundation did, it says Signal did... which is well-documented in OTF's annual reports among other places.
I agree that this article has lots of other problems, though; I describe more in my comment about it in another thread.

The other comment by @Pfosten@feddit.de focuses on the contents of the article, which are more important. I took a peek at the author, Kit Klarenberg.

The author also writes for The Grayzone (thegrayzone.com/author/kit-klarenberg/), which gets posted on Lemmy occasionally. Among other questionable and misleading pieces, The Grayzone and Kit put out articles 'calling out' Bellingcat and TOR...

For the stuff below, if you have doubts in the source, please follow up on the linked sources each one contains. To be clear, we do need to hold these tools and services accountable. Spreading misleading content does not help with that. Even worse if it's intentional disinformation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grayzone

an American fringe,[7] far-left[19] news website and blog,[23] founded and edited by American journalist Max Blumenthal

The website, initially founded as The Grayzone Project,[24] was affiliated with AlterNet before becoming independent in early 2018.[4] It is known for its critical coverage of the US and its foreign policy,[1] misleading reporting,[25][26] and sympathetic coverage of authoritarian regimes.[4][21][27][28] The Grayzone has downplayed or denied the Chinese government's human rights abuses against Uyghurs,[32] published conspiracy theories about Venezuela, Xinjiang, Syria, and other regions,[33][34] and published pro-Russian propaganda during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-grayzone/

Overall, we rate The Grayzone Far-Left Biased and Questionable based on the promotion of propaganda, conspiracy theories, and consistent one-sided reporting.

Literally the definition of FUD. Shit tier article.

Misleading. No sane person will trust that article

This is certainly one way to spin this.

It doesn’t touch on all the other donations signal receives, including the major loan from Brian Acton. The OTF isn’t the only source of funding that signal has.

Signal will be fine. In fact now that the OTF have withdrawn funding it’ll probably shake off the weird take that Signal is CIA tech.

OTF funding is also not a direct indication of funding from US intelligence or backdoors in the code. OTF could just be promoting development of software that breaks free of repressive regimes, which indirectly benefits US foreign policy.
- which indirectly benefits US foreign policy
  See the last part of my response to this article for one of the other ways it benefits the US.

~~Wow. I really had no idea. I'm unsure if this implies anything about its security or not, the article kinda glosses over it I think.~~

The other comments have clarified that the article was (at best) very misleading.

Considering another user mentioned that the funding was before Trump was in office, I'm sure there wasn't an intentional reason to gloss over both of those points.... /s

If signal can collapse because of a single contributor withdrawing support, then it kind of deserves to die. If It's not robust enough to withstand the lack of money, it would never stand up to government intervention.

Though I suspect signal is perfectly fine, this is just an outrage seeking article for clicks. Or unnecessary conspiracy. If you don't trust signal, you have other options like simple x, briar.....

Intentional conspiracy, judging by who the author writes for
- It's a good thought experiment. Let's assume signal is a conspiracy.
  What do we do now?
  The article doesn't seem to have any thesis here. If signal becomes untenable:
  Briar and simple x are the most promising in my mind, but I know there's a lot of proponents of matrix.
  I personally don't think session is sustainable, simply because they don't have any development going on, no perfect forward secrecy added.
  If we're talking about the signal replacement, we need a way for people to find their contacts. A phone contact list as a social graph is pretty good. I could see that being added as a discovery, optional, service for simplex, or even briar. But that would probably take quite a bit of development of work to do it in a non-Spammy fashion

If this were true, then it'd be a good signal it frustrates feds, no?

This article may be bullshit, but people are still wasting their time on walled gardens like Signal. Organizations like Signal can easily disappear because they run out of money or, arguably worse, sellout because there is no other way to stay afloat. I wouldn't use any messenger not compatible with the XMPP internet standard at this point.

Isn't signal open source though? I know being open source doesn't magically make it interoperable with other services but even if Signal or Whisper systems sell out, someone could just fork the projects
- You cannot run Signal without "Signal - the company" existing. All of their systems are designed to be attached to one specific backend, namely the signal-run backend, meaning without re-engineering the existing infrastructure you cannot simply swap over.
  As @kpw already mentioned, "Signal - the company" dying would involve a functional reset of everything: No contacts, no servers, no infrastructure. COULD you fork the thing and build you own system? Sure, but it would be functionally unusable since no one else would be using it, since everything relies on specifically the signal servers to function. A post-signal system could re-use some of their code (if it runs outside signal corp - "works on my machine" could be present in this project as well), but would need to rebuild the actual network.
  This is in contrast to something like the matrix protocol: If a specific matrix instance goes kaput, you still have the overall network working. This means that even if an instance implodes, you would have an easy migration path since the matrix network itself persists.
- All your contacts will still be gone when their servers shut down.
deleted
I tried XMPP. It was a nightmare.
Finding clients for all the platforms that support all of the extensions that make it a viable alternative to something like WhatsApp or Signal...
- Here is what I found works pretty good
  
  Android: Conversations Linux: Dino Apple: Monal Windows: Gajim

Lots of Greyzone tankie bullshit on lemmy lately.

Always knew this project was a honeypot since they need your phone number to function. Why would a foss app force you to use a phone number? I bet the cia and other three letter organizations spend money advertising signal on various platforms.

For a project like Signal, there are competing aspects of security:
privacy and anonymity: keep as little identifiable information around as possible. This can be a life or death thing under repressive governments.
safety and anti-abuse: reliably block bad actors such as spammers, and make it possible for users to reliably block specific people (e.g. a creepy stalker). This is really important for Signal to have a chance at mass appeal (which in turn makes it less suspicious to have Signal installed).
Phone number verification is the state of the art approach to make it more expensive for bad actors to create thousands of burner accounts, at the cost of preventing fully anonymous participation (depending on the difficulty of getting a prepaid SIM in your country).
Signal points out that sending verification SMS is actually one of its largest cost centers, currently accounting for 6M USD out of their 14M USD infrastructure budget: https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-expensive/
I'm sure they would be thrilled if there were cheaper anti-abuse measures.