Dessalines

You can’t simply say “we must assume” as evidence.

Okay yeah you definitely didn’t read it. Large sections in that doc just before that are on phone number identifiers, NSLs, and 5-eyes countries, the US goverment pushing signal in privacy spaces… literally the reasons why signal isn’t trustworthy. Unless you can tell me what an NSL is, then I’ll assume you didn’t read it.

While there may be other US government requests they are not alllwed to disclose, they were legally required to provide the same information to the courts, and we can see what they provided.

Did you ignore the large section on NSLs? These come with a gag order, meaning its illegal for signal to notify their users about them being spied on.

In fact, they implemented “Sealed sender” in 2018 where they are not able to see who the message is being sent to.

This is a “just trust me” from signal, since neither of us have access to their centralized DB, but you also ignored two paragraphs down, where it showed that with message timestamps and recipient information, this would be trivial to find the real sender of a message, regardless of sealed sender. Again, actually open source software can’t say “just trust me” like signal can, we actually have to show code to prove it, and let people run that code in a private manner.

And sure, while the US government funds Signal, you know who else endorses it? Edward fucking Snowden. If anyone knows about secure messaging, it’s the man that physically removes the microphone and camera from his phones before using them.

Elon musk and jack dorsey also endorse signal. An endorsement means nothing, especially for centralized software based in a 5-eyes country.

Read the linked doc, because it’s clear you didn’t.

Signal is a centralized, US-based service which requires your phone number (thus your real identity, IE name and address), has social networking graphs of everyone you talk to, and must forward that information to the US government when asked, as well as (by law) not tell you that they’ve been asked to do so. During the Obama era, 60 NSLs were issued for this private information every single day.

People overlook its privacy concerns for the same reason they do with apple: it has a shiny interface and is easy to use, and makes people very attached to it. Behind all that, is a surveillance network that its creators have explicitly said they do not want it to be able to run in a decentralized, private manner.

It has a long history of privacy offenses below (such as refusing to publish its server’s source code for years, its reliance on other US tech services (amazon, google), US-government funding, and a US-defense-tank friendly administration) which get ignored or shouted down by many of those above. See the article below.

Why not signal.

Pretty much any alternative is better, as long as its not hosted in a five-eyes country, and especially if it doesn’t require phone numbers or real identities like signal does.

I personally have been using SimpleX for friends and real life contacts, and Matrix for larger more anonymous group chats.

It’s not just having a “command economy”, it’s in whose interest the economy is being commanded for. The PRC went through an intense anti-colonial / communist revolution to disempower the feudalists and reactionaries, and capture the state to bring it under a worker-peasant control.

If western nations want to repeat the success of the PRC, they need to repeat China’s steps from 1949. They would each need to go through violent revolutions to capture the state and overthrow bourgeois democracy. Otherwise, capitalists will still hold power, and their economies will be commanded to suit capitalist interests.

Competent vs incompetent managers of empire.