“Signal is being blocked in Venezuela and Russia. The app is a popular choice for encrypted messaging and people trying to avoid government censorship, and the blocks appear to be part of a crackdown on internal dissent in both countries…”

blocks appear to be part of a crackdown on internal dissent in both countries.

Or… you know… at least for Venezuela, the USA constantly fucking around with their elections and politics and local assets using Signal or something. Maybe, I dunno?

Yeah. Telegram, should be next, there’s a huge risk with it too. And email! Social networks too, just in case. And postal mail, we can’t forget that. We should crack down any form of uncensored communication.

All for the benefit of the people, of course. \s

I mean signal was funded in part by the US intelligence community up until last year.

The current president of Signal is also still happy to do interviews with US-defense-oriented think tanks like Lawfare.

They probably still are funded by USIntel, considering how interested RFA was in pushing Signal in privacy-oriented spaces.

Unrelated to what the previous person is saying (banned because it was used by dissidents), but still, we have the source code. If you’re arguing they are somehow accessing the data, what’s encrypted and what isn’t is known.

Signal knows who you are taking to. You can build a network of contacts based on that information. When you send messages your phone number is protected but your ip address is not, and the receivers phone number is not protected. So you can find two people chatting based on that information. The app automatically sends a delivery receipt when a message is received to the other user, exposing the senders phone number and IP address.

However, opposition in the country is backed by western agencies and NGOs, and likely their primary means of communication is signal since it’s backed by western intelligence, meaning, western actors believe it to be safe from external interference.

I’m not arguing that the west is reading messages. I’m arguing that they believe it’s a safe haven for their agents because they pay money to ensure it’s safe for their agents. If it wasn’t, they wouldn’t use it. Its the same reason why the intelligence community in the west is a large supporter of the tor network. They use it in the field and operate their own exit nodes to protect their operations.

That’s what you fail to understand. It’s open source, it has been audited. Venezuela and any other country can check and crack the encryption if has holes in it. The long first paragraph is something that’s not a secret, but widely known.

You know what’s also safe? Encrypted emails. VPNs. Matrix.

If you think this is a movement against foreign agents, you should think it’s useless too. For a sufficiently motivated agent, this will be trivial to overcome. For the general population? Not so much.

Unless next all forms of private communication re forbidden, of curse. Surely what people on a privacy community advocate for.

Is the opposition using those services?

well, except for all the times Signal just “forgets” to update the published source code of a year or so. Other than that its perfectly open source

In UK don’t ban them, but jail you if they don’t like your posts, more democratic.

The people inciting race riots deserve everything they get.

I’m not aware of the kingdom of whataboutistan. Is it related to this post somehow?

Yes, different kind of censorship in the world. A more broad vision.

Keep going, then. Any other country to mention, seeing how it’s important to you? Russia? China? Italy? India? Pakistan?

I somehow feel your “broad” is actually quite narrow. Usually happens with the whatabautisms

Why going so long when we have a near, english-speaking , clean example of a country famous for the free speech. If you have the highest example of human rights why check the rest.

While I don’t live in the UK I do believe they have protections on free speech.

If you are concerned you can always hide your identity.

I’m not living in uk, i live in italy. I saw every kind of comment written on italian social networks and i have never seen a conviction. When the police had taken the names of protesters, ( not arrested ) we had a public outcry. We had arrest for direct call for violence, not simply rants. So seeing people jailed for rants on twitter scares me. We have actual fascists and communists, both parties were strong, and we had an actual civil war. We have strong linguistic minorities and regional parties. So a lot of people hating each other. Who decide the right speech in such a situation?

Are people really jailed for rants in the UK? I’ve only seen stories of actual call to violence.

The line between rants and call for violence is quite blurred in some cases IMHO

I have some bad news for you. There is no right answer

And normaly it is very difficult to be comdemned for a generic rant. It is easier in case of insults or defamtion, but it is mostly an high fee. Jailing a political adversary for a speech ( when we had a lot of political/mafia killing in the past ) is a big no. We had actual people killed for their speech.

Self defense is self defense, would we expect some different behavior from a country being attacked from outside interests with publicly accessible end to end encryption services?

Publicly accessible: reviewed and audited by hundreds of teams that confirmed there’s no backdoor. Venezuelan, Russian and Chinese governments didn’t find the holes, even having access to the code. If they did, they would be exploiting it to… reeducate.

Yeah, I would expect to trust that. Still, you said yourself, the problem is that is used by dissidents. And we can’t have that, right?

Open source, except when they do not publish it. Funded incredibly heavily buy the United States Intelegency Agencies. That would be more than enough to raise red flags for any nation that is not on the best terms with the United States.

Signal in all likelyhood is a honey pot

Funded by the US? Well thats the entire internet, including Tor, Linux and Matrix…

Amazing how much BS is spread here

The server is arguably more important, that is where the data and meta data itself are stored. Linux has never hid its source code for a year, and matrix can be self hosted.

I mean if you want to trust a honey pot go right ahead

they do seem to have blocked reddit and twitter

We can’t have individual thinkers running around can we. We need a shared vision that is dictated from the top down.

Like literal genocide being pushed from the top down as a pesky single issue vote? Our individual thinkers are too busy working 80hr weeks, btw.

For their own good. Individual thinkers tend to have short lives. Just look how many people thinked themselves of a window in Russia on the last year.

I’m pretty sure Venezuela was unstable before the US started getting involved.

Anyway Signal is secure so that shouldn’t be the problem. It has more to do with the government working to crush civil liberties and independent thought.

Same story in all authoritarian countries

First no Venezuela was stable before US medeling.

Second, “is secure” is quite a leap, it is funded to a sickening extent by the United States government, has gone about a year before opening up its source code, and is in the US where there is a law that says if the US government says show us everything and keep quiet, they have to do that. There are real concerns

Or you can uncriticaly say “Athoritarian Country” with no defineing term there, or real understanding of Athoritarianism and disreguard all concerns from these countries.

The US government funds it because they use it heavily. I think you should pay for software you use.

Also Venezuela has never really been stable. You could argue that the US made it worse but honesty the problem is everyone getting involved.

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