Signal: Government Communication

This link goes to the page where Signal posts every time they get a government request. Learned that tonight IRL in a public conversation with Meredith Whittaker from Signal. She is a great speaker btw.

You should know they are very different from Telegram lol. But my interest was, what if they become so popular they become big tech themselves. Anyway for robustness of the network they will not technologically decentralize, so not like matrix people running their own servers. But I hope someday they decentralize their governance, like being a public good, publicly governed. Maybe add some crypto rails ;)

Anyway you have to trust them in the end of course, and up till now I’m trusting them. Don’t think it’s a CIA honeypot haha. Saying this as a paying Signal user.

I am surprised there are so few of them. I once went to the workshop at Censorship wtf about moderation. The workshop was organized by people who used to run one of the world's biggest Mastodon servers, primarily focused on the Chinese community.

They said they had three letter agencies reaching out to them almost every month. Primarily from China but not only from there.

If I were to steelman Signal's reporting here, maybe agencies know that Signal is e2ee and can't help, so they don't reach out at all?