“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…”

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14 points

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

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

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20 points

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.

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-1 points

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.

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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.

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18 points

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

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6 points

The people inciting race riots deserve everything they get.

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-1 points

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

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8 points

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

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-2 points

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.

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7 points

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?

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8 points

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?

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-5 points

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?

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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

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3 points

they do seem to have blocked reddit and twitter

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0 points

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

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3 points

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.

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-2 points

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.

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