Choosing Signal: a political act in the era of constant surveillance

The brouhaha following the revelation that senior figures in the Trump administration used Signal (badly) to coordinate sensitive communications about bombings in Yemen shows why governments don’t want the rest of us talking to each other on encrypted platforms.

Signal was used by Trump officials in the run-up to the US attacks against Yemen on March 15, reveals The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who was included in the conversation on the unclassified chat app by mistake. That’s right; the same idiots who in 2015 said that Hillary Clinton should be locked up for using her Gmail account to discuss government business, now invites Democratic Party supporting journalists into his conversations. Karma is a bitch…

Leaving aside the comedy gold brought by a ridiculously incompetent government, what’s really interesting here is the app Team Trump chose: Signal. Not WhatsApp. Not Telegram. Not iMessage. Signal. The app that doesn’t even store metadata, and the European Commission’s choice for its staff precisely because of its radical commitment to privacy. Meta’s WhatsApp likes to say that its encryption technology, copied from Signal, is impenetrable. But as Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal, explains: the issue isn’t just encryption, but metadata. Meta knows who talks to whom, when, from…