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hedgedoops201/21/20251 replyview on HN

Maybe not individual warrants (at least not warrants to do non-scalable collections like hardware bugs in one's phone - I.e. warrants that, most users, with high probability, are not subject to). But mass surveillance, e.g. NSA, even with 'mass warrants' (e.g. Verizon-FISA warrant), that everyone is subject to, is probably in most people's attacker model. I don't have a study handy, but it seems reasonable that most users use signal to protect against mass surveillance and signal advertises itself as being good for this.

Also Marlinspike and Whittaker are quite outspoken about mass surveillance.

If cloudflare can compile a big part of the "who chats with whom" graph, that is a system design defect.


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autoexec01/21/2025

I highly doubt that signal does anything to help with mass surveillance. Signal started keeping people's name, photo, phone number, and contacts in the cloud protected by a "secure" enclave the NSA almost certainly has access to and hackers already got into (https://community.signalusers.org/t/sgx-cacheout-sgaxe-attac...) and even leaving all that aside, all anyone needs is a PIN that can be trivially brute forced. (https://www.vice.com/en/article/signal-new-pin-feature-worri...)

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