Choosing Signal: a political act in the era of constant surveillance

The brouhaha following the revelation that senior figures in the Trump administration used Signal (badly) to coordinate sensitive communications about bombings in Yemen shows why governments don’t want the rest of us talking to each other on encrypted platforms.

Signal was used by Trump officials in the run-up to the US attacks against Yemen on March 15, reveals The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who was included in the conversation on the unclassified chat app by mistake. That’s right; the same idiots who in 2015 said that Hillary Clinton should be locked up for using her Gmail account to discuss government business, now invites Democratic Party supporting journalists into his conversations. Karma is a bitch…

Leaving aside the comedy gold brought by a ridiculously incompetent government, what’s really interesting here is the app Team Trump chose: Signal. Not WhatsApp. Not Telegram. Not iMessage. Signal. The app that doesn’t even store metadata, and the European Commission’s choice for its staff precisely because of its radical commitment to privacy. Meta’s WhatsApp likes to say that its encryption technology, copied from Signal, is impenetrable. But as Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal, explains: the issue isn’t just encryption, but metadata. Meta knows who talks to whom, when, from where, and how often, and that’s pure gold for corporate and state surveillance. Signal, by design, can’t access or share that information, because it simply doesn’t store it.

Moxie Marlinspike celebrated the very public plug for the company he founded in 2018 on Monday, whose foundational design was simple: to build a system that provided absolute privacy. That philosophy hasn’t changed, and it’s been tested repeatedly. When the UK proposed laws to weaken end-to-end encryption, Signal was blunt: it would rather shut down than compromise users’ security.

In contrast, WhatsApp has shown itself perfectly happy to collaborate with governments or change its privacy policies. Following Facebook’s disastrous 2021 update that forced users agree to share their WhatsApp information with all Facebook’s algorithms, millions migrated to Signal and Telegram. However, the network effect plays its trump card: the biggest concern of WhatsApp users…