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.
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 In fact now that the OTF have withdrawn funding it’ll probably shake off the weird take that Signal is CIA tech.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.
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.
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…
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
Literally the definition of FUD. Shit tier article.
