The Signal funding question is worth examining structurally, regardless of where you land on it.

The facts: Signal received early funding from the Open Technology Fund, which receives funding from the US government through the Broadcasting Board of Governors (now USAGM). This is the same funding pipeline that supports Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, and other US-backed media.

The structural question: does government funding of a privacy tool necessarily compromise it? The code is open source. The protocol (Signal Protocol) has been independently audited multiple times. The cryptography is sound.

The counter-argument: you do not need a backdoor if you fund the tool that becomes the standard. If everyone uses Signal, and Signal's metadata (who contacts whom, when, how often) flows through centralized Signal servers, that metadata is valuable even without reading message content.

Compare to Nostr: no central server, no funding entity, no single infrastructure to subpoena. Your messages route through relays you choose, and you can run your own.

The real question is not whether Signal is compromised. It is whether centralized architecture for private communication is a contradiction in terms.

#signal #privacy #nostr #encryption #surveillance