alt Hacker NewsIt’s primarily to guard against insider threats - E2E makes it very hard for one Signal employee to obtain everyone’s chat transcripts.
Anyone whose threat model includes well-resourced actors (like governments) should indeed be building their communications software from source in a trustworthy build environment. But then of course you still have to trust the hardware.
tl;dr: E2E prevents some types of attacks, and makes some others more expensive; but if a government is after you, you’re still toast.
> tl;dr: E2E prevents some types of attacks, and makes some others more expensive; but if a government is after you, you’re still toast.
This is sorta my point, lots of DC folks use Signal under the assumption they're protected from government snooping. Sometimes I feel like it could well have the opposite effect (via the selection bias of Signal users).