I'm always surprised at the number of activists who still use vacuum information sucking F/B WhatsApp, when there is an excellent free encrypted message system that happens to be on our side. I am of course talking about "Signal", the messaging system that I try to get those I know to switch to, from the usual data gathering popular system. That simple change would make your communications practically useless to prying eyes, data gathering organisations, state and otherwise
Perhaps the following article might convince a few more to abandon the popular Facebook, WhatsApp data grabbing message systems for a free, secure and simple to use friendly system, Signal.
Technical discourse almost always generates an odd sort of distortion when it collides with life outside of disciplinary separations. This is very much the case when it comes to radicals and information security. Communications, computer science and cryptography are highly complex, to the point that even people working in the security industry full time have difficulty grasping the complexities from time to time. As we saw with the Snowden leaks, the combination of highly complex technical content and the possibility of danger in the form of surveillance, tended to generate a discourse grounded in hyperbole and conspiracizing. This approach often led people to either attempt to completely go dark, or to modify their practices base on false, misconstrued or misunderstood information.
Over the past series of years this phenomenon has emerged in relation to Signal and Tor, very specifically. Without getting too into the technical elements of each, we can definitively say that the conspiracies about weak encryption, protocols being “broken,” secret government backdoors and so on are commonly held, but ultimately damaging and false arguments. This tendency is gaining traction and accelerating in relation to Moxie Marlinspike leaving Signal.
