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.
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.
