On November 16th, Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal, published a detailed breakdown of the popular encrypted messaging app’s running costs for the very first time. The unprecedented disclosure’s motivation was simple - the platform is rapidly running out of money, and in dire need of donations to stay afloat. Unmentioned by Whittaker, this budget shortfall results in large part from the US intelligence community, which lavishly financed Signal’s creation and maintenance over several years, severing its support for the app.
All the sophisticated tools for tracking user content always make me wonder how it's possible to find anti-establishment comments but not find trillions of tax dollars lost in the Pentagon.
Every time I read these disclosures, I am becoming less shocked. Admittedly, my first shock was a discovery that Radio Free Europe was financed by CIA.... great work! Thank you for your investigations.
Dec 3, 2023·edited Dec 6, 2023Liked by Kit Klarenberg
The US intelligence community lavishly financing SIGNAL (as we know about other Silicon-Valley shooting stars) deserves much more attention than it actually gets.
Congrats on another bombshell investigation, Kit Klarenberg.
#FollowTheMoney is usually the way to shed light on inconvenient TRUTH.
Signal’s CIA funding reinforces the uncontroverted PATTERN of increasing corruption:
(1) Providers of IT safety / internet security / privacy PROTECTION /encryption / anti-virus software: are the ones spying and hacking your communication.
(2) The institutions that are supposed to PROTECT you (law enforcement): are the ones to turn against you, persecute, BETRAY + go after you (backdoor rooms at Heathrow airport to grill investigative journalists when they return to their country).
(3) US Gov (3-letter agencies) involved in instigating ATTACKS (both domestic and abroad, eg China’s Xinjiang province suddenly began experiencing deadly waves of terrorist attacks, and hundreds of people were killed, early 2000s).
(4) Institutions (Home Office) to oversee / SUPERVISE law enforcement abuse: are the ones facilitating, whitewashing and concealing the ABUSE.
(5) The ministry to ensure DEFENCE: is the one initiating and signing off OFFENCES abroad – How many invasions since the 2003 Iraq war? It was only the beginning. RIP Dr David Kelly.
(6) Those serving DISCLOSURE in the public’s interest are locked up in high-security prison or expatriated (Assange, Snowden, Murray..), while war CRIMINALS, L I A R S in congress walk around freely / are awarded high-calibre honours (Kissinger, Blair, Obama..)
(7) Those driving around with "CHILD PROTECTION" on their cars/vans: are the ones running CHILD TRAFFICKING. They have (i) access to the kids, (ii) know how to play the system and (iii) know how to derail defence lines.
Interestingly enough, as it might be surprising to some, in my experience Tor users are highly aware of how agencies like the FBI seek to subvert them through running their own Tor exit nodes (for those unaware, Tor basically relays your Internet traffic through other servers) and their attempts to deanonymise people.
So much recommendation is given to each other in how to try to prevent this, such as always without exception running Tor while using a VPN, and never altering the Tor browser in any way even by resizing the browser window, as such things can be used to fingerprint and identify people.
The most popular services Tor has traditionally been used for are without a doubt darknet markets, which are primarily used for the anonymous exchange of drugs (much higher quality than street drugs; some savvy street dealers will source from darknet markets) for cryptocurrencies, utilising PGP encryption for communications to prevent governments listening in or finding buyers' shipping addresses (sellers, of course, do not ship anything themselves, but get others to help them with it), and escrow and user review systems to avoid being scammed.
Ross Ulbricht—the creator of the first darknet market, the Silk Road, who is now locked up for the rest of his days after a farce trial where they poisoned the well against him with lies and had hacked his computers while never proving he was the sole person behind any of it—without a doubt holds the prestigious position of being one of the most influential cypherpunks of all time, up there with Julian Assange and Satoshi Nakamoto. If Nakamoto gave people a way to exchange money without the State having any say about it, Ulbricht gave them a way to exchange physical goods without the state having any say about it.
Encryption, like the other co-founder of Wikileaks Appelbaum once said, means that the traditional source of state power—the use of violence and the monopoly on it—becomes a math problem not easily solved by violence. Ulbricht's innovation and Tor's role in taking away state power over exchange of goods is, I would guess, probably part of why the spooks got so spooked over it.
Of course, they try to say it's all about stopping drugs, but when have they ever cared about that when everyone knows intelligence agencies like the CIA are notorious drug dealers themselves? One who care much less about their customers, I must add, as you won't find the CIA doing anything like what Hansa did when they banned fentanyl outright just before the FBI took them down, nor will you find officials from the city of Baltimore speaking their praises like the Silk Road for reducing drug violence and deaths.
We are in a 'Quiet War with Silent Weapons' but i knew this in the 1960s when I engaged with HMG War Office for a while. I moved to Xerox in the 1970s but nothing changed, LOL.
It's interesting in the context of Signal, as Signal Foundation discourages installation of Signal on non-Googlified android & non-Apple phones (by making it available only* through Google & Apple app stores, not any other app repositories eg F-Droid), meaning this news has implications for most Signal users.
*(To be fair, they have in recent years made it possible to download the apk directly, but not many users do that.)
It's little mentioned that the spooks are more interested in who is talking to who metadata than what is said (which, for matters they care about, is mostly obvious). You know, like when Signal rifles through your phone contacts.
HELP WANTED! What kind of wireless shadow network did the CIA build? We could try building something like that for when they require government ID for accessing the internet after the Great Hack they plan to make it fall and replace it with even Bigger Bro.
Otherwise? any solution? some guys are sending text messages thousands of miles away using shortwaves... but we need something practical like hacking cheap Baofeng handies and use them as modems....
They want to sabotage the internet (downing domain servers? null routing?) and provide the solution: replacing the internet protocol with a “better” one which requires WHO/UN/government certified digital ID for access , and allows government disinformation/hacking blockage.
No Internet Protocol (IP), no internet. Nothing will work, not even Bitcoin: “On the bitcoin network, nodes also provide IP addresses of the nodes they are talking to for routing purposes, and they create TCP connections with their peers to manage the details of sending packets between them.” 1
No TCP? There are several communication protocols that could still work, like User Datagram Protocol (UDP)2 but UDP is a transport layer protocol that is used over IP. It is not possible to use UDP without IP. TCP and UDP are peer protocols; both exist at the layer above IP. Telnet and PsPing use Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP).
There are some apps that can run without an internet connection by creating a peer-to-peer Bluetooth mesh network or Wifi Direct-based network on your phone eliminating the need for mobile data services. It allows direct peer-to-peer communication, it broadcasts information to all nearby devices and it can also use nodes to send messages to devices that are out of range using other nodes as data transfer nodes.3
Bridgefy
Briar: a messaging app for Android/PC that grants secure offline messaging without needing any mobile data or WiFi connection: but needs WiFi, Bluetooth, Tor or USB for sending messages.4
Fire Chat
Signal Offline Messenger
iOS: Vojer, Peer Chat
Near Peer 5
In the early 80s days, there were pre-internet protocols like UUCP, Usenet and FidoNet, but they relied on modems working through the telephone lines. Now, near all the copper lines have been replaced with fiber optics so it might be more complicated if those lines are scanned for modem activity. Still, they might work until they install ID access to lines/electricity and/or realize they are being used and block it.
Transmission lines is the weak spot. So radio waves are the way to build a real free-net. The problem is that they can be picked up and decoded.
1. No encryption: for some messages you need no security (how are you? What do you want me to buy?)
2. Symmetric encryption: for trusted users
3. Asymmetric encryption: for non-trustable
4. Ultra-secret: cryptography strong enough for quantum computers and AI
Another way is switching bands automatically according to a protocol: eventually, they could scan all frequencies at the same time, but the strings will be shorter and they could be mistaken with strings in other frequencies or even they could mix with other streams, making them impossible to decipher.
To build a city mesh mobiles/radios should be able to relay messages.
With a 2 km range, you’d only need 10 devices for a 20 km long communication (length of a large city).
Considering low bandwidth and hardware specs, maybe 1 min voice-compressed messages should be the maximum and that they expire in x time.
Considering that cell phones emit 3 watts at most, it would be interesting to see if radios could be hacked for the purpose, then you’d get over 8 watts (longer range).
For example, Underpass offers peer-to-peer encrypted file transfer and chat for macOS.6 If it is a web application you need to access, simply using the internal IP of the server would suffice to access it. 7
“While work on QUIC began in Google in 2013. QUIC is used as the underlying transport for the new major version of HTTP, HTTP/3. HTTP/3 is currently supported by 73% of running web browsers and used by 25% of the top 10 million websites. The wide deployment of HTTP/3 is largely attributed to how large internet companies like Google and Facebook use QUIC for their services and browsers. As it was first developed by Google, the company strongly pushed its deployment. Thus, the story of QUIC is once more a story of the extreme influence large players have on the technical landscape of the internet.
Instead of using the Transmission Control Protocol (which earlier HTTP versions used), QUIC builds upon the User Datagram Protocol (UDP)”.8
“it is extremely hard to beat the efficiency of a production TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) implementation...
You can implement something very like TCP on top of UDP, that’s what QUIC (the transport for HTTP/3) is. Don’t ever think you can get away with not implementing congestion control. Your users will quickly discover that your app kills their networks, and you’ll end up blocked everywhere.” 9
QUIC performs significantly better than TCP and UDP in lossy networks.10
QUIC “will eat the Internet” (connections can be associated with multiple IP addresses for each endpoint).11
2021 “The new QUIC protocol has already been published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), making it an official network protocol” to replace TCP. 12
Why? They needed a better protocol for IoT and IoH. “MQTT is a lightweight messaging protocol specifically designed for situations where low bandwidth, high latency, or unreliable networks are common. It operates at the application layer and is primarily used for machine-to-machine (M2M) communications and Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. MQTT over QUIC provides significant advantages compared to MQTT over TCP/TLS.” 13
“MQTT over QUIC: Next-Generation IoT Standard Protocol.” 14
QUIC or HTTP/3 is vulnerable to government censorship.15 But there are some ways for evasion16 and resistance17.
" such as always without exception running Tor while using a VPN, " yeah no that's wrong. Your are more likely to be fingerprinted if you use tor with a vpn
You say Moxie "mysteriously failed to mention millions were provided by Open Technology Fund (OTF)."
So how much did Signal/OWS receive from OTF?
OTF merely listed Signal as having previously received OTF-support when it was still Open Whisper Systems. Doesn't say how much. It does however mention the 50m contributed by the ex-whatsapp guy. https://www.opentech.fund/news/february-2018-monthly-report/
I'm struggling to see how you came to the conclusion that Signal is about to collapse.
Sure, 40-50m is a lot of money for an individual, but for a business operating at that scale? Is it so inconceivable that the user-base is actually covering most of the cost through donations and has been for a number of years?
And what evidence do you have that tor is back-doored?
All the sophisticated tools for tracking user content always make me wonder how it's possible to find anti-establishment comments but not find trillions of tax dollars lost in the Pentagon.
Every time I read these disclosures, I am becoming less shocked. Admittedly, my first shock was a discovery that Radio Free Europe was financed by CIA.... great work! Thank you for your investigations.
The US intelligence community lavishly financing SIGNAL (as we know about other Silicon-Valley shooting stars) deserves much more attention than it actually gets.
Congrats on another bombshell investigation, Kit Klarenberg.
#FollowTheMoney is usually the way to shed light on inconvenient TRUTH.
Signal’s CIA funding reinforces the uncontroverted PATTERN of increasing corruption:
(1) Providers of IT safety / internet security / privacy PROTECTION /encryption / anti-virus software: are the ones spying and hacking your communication.
(2) The institutions that are supposed to PROTECT you (law enforcement): are the ones to turn against you, persecute, BETRAY + go after you (backdoor rooms at Heathrow airport to grill investigative journalists when they return to their country).
(3) US Gov (3-letter agencies) involved in instigating ATTACKS (both domestic and abroad, eg China’s Xinjiang province suddenly began experiencing deadly waves of terrorist attacks, and hundreds of people were killed, early 2000s).
(4) Institutions (Home Office) to oversee / SUPERVISE law enforcement abuse: are the ones facilitating, whitewashing and concealing the ABUSE.
(5) The ministry to ensure DEFENCE: is the one initiating and signing off OFFENCES abroad – How many invasions since the 2003 Iraq war? It was only the beginning. RIP Dr David Kelly.
(6) Those serving DISCLOSURE in the public’s interest are locked up in high-security prison or expatriated (Assange, Snowden, Murray..), while war CRIMINALS, L I A R S in congress walk around freely / are awarded high-calibre honours (Kissinger, Blair, Obama..)
(7) Those driving around with "CHILD PROTECTION" on their cars/vans: are the ones running CHILD TRAFFICKING. They have (i) access to the kids, (ii) know how to play the system and (iii) know how to derail defence lines.
The world has turned upside down.
#TRAITORS
Keep shining your light, Kit.
Interestingly enough, as it might be surprising to some, in my experience Tor users are highly aware of how agencies like the FBI seek to subvert them through running their own Tor exit nodes (for those unaware, Tor basically relays your Internet traffic through other servers) and their attempts to deanonymise people.
So much recommendation is given to each other in how to try to prevent this, such as always without exception running Tor while using a VPN, and never altering the Tor browser in any way even by resizing the browser window, as such things can be used to fingerprint and identify people.
The most popular services Tor has traditionally been used for are without a doubt darknet markets, which are primarily used for the anonymous exchange of drugs (much higher quality than street drugs; some savvy street dealers will source from darknet markets) for cryptocurrencies, utilising PGP encryption for communications to prevent governments listening in or finding buyers' shipping addresses (sellers, of course, do not ship anything themselves, but get others to help them with it), and escrow and user review systems to avoid being scammed.
Ross Ulbricht—the creator of the first darknet market, the Silk Road, who is now locked up for the rest of his days after a farce trial where they poisoned the well against him with lies and had hacked his computers while never proving he was the sole person behind any of it—without a doubt holds the prestigious position of being one of the most influential cypherpunks of all time, up there with Julian Assange and Satoshi Nakamoto. If Nakamoto gave people a way to exchange money without the State having any say about it, Ulbricht gave them a way to exchange physical goods without the state having any say about it.
Encryption, like the other co-founder of Wikileaks Appelbaum once said, means that the traditional source of state power—the use of violence and the monopoly on it—becomes a math problem not easily solved by violence. Ulbricht's innovation and Tor's role in taking away state power over exchange of goods is, I would guess, probably part of why the spooks got so spooked over it.
Of course, they try to say it's all about stopping drugs, but when have they ever cared about that when everyone knows intelligence agencies like the CIA are notorious drug dealers themselves? One who care much less about their customers, I must add, as you won't find the CIA doing anything like what Hansa did when they banned fentanyl outright just before the FBI took them down, nor will you find officials from the city of Baltimore speaking their praises like the Silk Road for reducing drug violence and deaths.
Many thanks Kit - good Intel - I have passed it on. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA440962
We are in a 'Quiet War with Silent Weapons' but i knew this in the 1960s when I engaged with HMG War Office for a while. I moved to Xerox in the 1970s but nothing changed, LOL.
New article in Reuters on mass surveillance of (meta-)data of push-notifications by unnamed foreign governments alligned with the US: https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/governments-spying-apple-google-users-through-push-notifications-us-senator-2023-12-06/
It's interesting in the context of Signal, as Signal Foundation discourages installation of Signal on non-Googlified android & non-Apple phones (by making it available only* through Google & Apple app stores, not any other app repositories eg F-Droid), meaning this news has implications for most Signal users.
*(To be fair, they have in recent years made it possible to download the apk directly, but not many users do that.)
It's little mentioned that the spooks are more interested in who is talking to who metadata than what is said (which, for matters they care about, is mostly obvious). You know, like when Signal rifles through your phone contacts.
likewise proton
HELP WANTED! What kind of wireless shadow network did the CIA build? We could try building something like that for when they require government ID for accessing the internet after the Great Hack they plan to make it fall and replace it with even Bigger Bro.
Otherwise? any solution? some guys are sending text messages thousands of miles away using shortwaves... but we need something practical like hacking cheap Baofeng handies and use them as modems....
Help anyone?
The full PLAN exposed:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/the-plan-revealed
16 laws we need to exit Prison Planet
Politics got us in, politics is the way out ... after prayers!
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/laws-to-exit-planet-prison
Some notes:
The Great Hack
They want to sabotage the internet (downing domain servers? null routing?) and provide the solution: replacing the internet protocol with a “better” one which requires WHO/UN/government certified digital ID for access , and allows government disinformation/hacking blockage.
No Internet Protocol (IP), no internet. Nothing will work, not even Bitcoin: “On the bitcoin network, nodes also provide IP addresses of the nodes they are talking to for routing purposes, and they create TCP connections with their peers to manage the details of sending packets between them.” 1
No TCP? There are several communication protocols that could still work, like User Datagram Protocol (UDP)2 but UDP is a transport layer protocol that is used over IP. It is not possible to use UDP without IP. TCP and UDP are peer protocols; both exist at the layer above IP. Telnet and PsPing use Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP).
There are some apps that can run without an internet connection by creating a peer-to-peer Bluetooth mesh network or Wifi Direct-based network on your phone eliminating the need for mobile data services. It allows direct peer-to-peer communication, it broadcasts information to all nearby devices and it can also use nodes to send messages to devices that are out of range using other nodes as data transfer nodes.3
Bridgefy
Briar: a messaging app for Android/PC that grants secure offline messaging without needing any mobile data or WiFi connection: but needs WiFi, Bluetooth, Tor or USB for sending messages.4
Fire Chat
Signal Offline Messenger
iOS: Vojer, Peer Chat
Near Peer 5
In the early 80s days, there were pre-internet protocols like UUCP, Usenet and FidoNet, but they relied on modems working through the telephone lines. Now, near all the copper lines have been replaced with fiber optics so it might be more complicated if those lines are scanned for modem activity. Still, they might work until they install ID access to lines/electricity and/or realize they are being used and block it.
Transmission lines is the weak spot. So radio waves are the way to build a real free-net. The problem is that they can be picked up and decoded.
1. No encryption: for some messages you need no security (how are you? What do you want me to buy?)
2. Symmetric encryption: for trusted users
3. Asymmetric encryption: for non-trustable
4. Ultra-secret: cryptography strong enough for quantum computers and AI
Another way is switching bands automatically according to a protocol: eventually, they could scan all frequencies at the same time, but the strings will be shorter and they could be mistaken with strings in other frequencies or even they could mix with other streams, making them impossible to decipher.
To build a city mesh mobiles/radios should be able to relay messages.
With a 2 km range, you’d only need 10 devices for a 20 km long communication (length of a large city).
Considering low bandwidth and hardware specs, maybe 1 min voice-compressed messages should be the maximum and that they expire in x time.
Considering that cell phones emit 3 watts at most, it would be interesting to see if radios could be hacked for the purpose, then you’d get over 8 watts (longer range).
For example, Underpass offers peer-to-peer encrypted file transfer and chat for macOS.6 If it is a web application you need to access, simply using the internal IP of the server would suffice to access it. 7
“While work on QUIC began in Google in 2013. QUIC is used as the underlying transport for the new major version of HTTP, HTTP/3. HTTP/3 is currently supported by 73% of running web browsers and used by 25% of the top 10 million websites. The wide deployment of HTTP/3 is largely attributed to how large internet companies like Google and Facebook use QUIC for their services and browsers. As it was first developed by Google, the company strongly pushed its deployment. Thus, the story of QUIC is once more a story of the extreme influence large players have on the technical landscape of the internet.
Instead of using the Transmission Control Protocol (which earlier HTTP versions used), QUIC builds upon the User Datagram Protocol (UDP)”.8
“it is extremely hard to beat the efficiency of a production TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) implementation...
You can implement something very like TCP on top of UDP, that’s what QUIC (the transport for HTTP/3) is. Don’t ever think you can get away with not implementing congestion control. Your users will quickly discover that your app kills their networks, and you’ll end up blocked everywhere.” 9
QUIC performs significantly better than TCP and UDP in lossy networks.10
QUIC “will eat the Internet” (connections can be associated with multiple IP addresses for each endpoint).11
2021 “The new QUIC protocol has already been published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), making it an official network protocol” to replace TCP. 12
Why? They needed a better protocol for IoT and IoH. “MQTT is a lightweight messaging protocol specifically designed for situations where low bandwidth, high latency, or unreliable networks are common. It operates at the application layer and is primarily used for machine-to-machine (M2M) communications and Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. MQTT over QUIC provides significant advantages compared to MQTT over TCP/TLS.” 13
“MQTT over QUIC: Next-Generation IoT Standard Protocol.” 14
QUIC or HTTP/3 is vulnerable to government censorship.15 But there are some ways for evasion16 and resistance17.
So -- was Signal protecting content or CIA, etc. could read all content?
" such as always without exception running Tor while using a VPN, " yeah no that's wrong. Your are more likely to be fingerprinted if you use tor with a vpn
This rabbit hole goes even deeper.
Did you know, Ed Snowden almost exclusively supports OTF-funded products. Coincidence?
https://mrereports.substack.com/p/snowden-and-controlled-opposition
Hi Kit,
You say Moxie "mysteriously failed to mention millions were provided by Open Technology Fund (OTF)."
So how much did Signal/OWS receive from OTF?
OTF merely listed Signal as having previously received OTF-support when it was still Open Whisper Systems. Doesn't say how much. It does however mention the 50m contributed by the ex-whatsapp guy. https://www.opentech.fund/news/february-2018-monthly-report/
I'm struggling to see how you came to the conclusion that Signal is about to collapse.
Sure, 40-50m is a lot of money for an individual, but for a business operating at that scale? Is it so inconceivable that the user-base is actually covering most of the cost through donations and has been for a number of years?
And what evidence do you have that tor is back-doored?
If the government is involved, the app has a backdoor.
So is Signal safe to use or not?
So is signal sharing user data with the CIA?