But downloading Signal after news like these will tag people as trying to hide something from the state.
Regardless of the framing of the article, many people likely read this and thought, "yes, it would be nice to be confident my messaging is private even from mass government surveillance."
This does not mean they are drug dealers. It means that they have concluded wide-dragnet surveillance programs are worth opting out of, especially if it's very easy to do so.
It means for me, but I fail to see why it is bad. Even direct "not your business" does not prove any guilt. It is okay to hide, we don't have to be open book.
Signal is a joke if your adversary is NSA and its likes. You cant run Signal unless you give up who you are, and that you are using it, and its not very difficult to analyze _when_ you receiveor send a message due to the Signal requiring google messaging system.
Signal should just really rename itself to "Google Signal, no really we are not evil for certain."
Your last sentence is extremely unfair to Signal and dramatically underrates the privacy it provides to ordinary people. It's dangerous to suggest that because it requires a phone number and lives on an app store it provides no useful protection at all, because that implies it's no better than e.g. WhatsApp when in fact it has a much better featureset.
Almost everybody might be in that situation, because the NSA is not the only group that has access to the data they collect. They call it "parallel construction", where the NSA's "customers" like the DEA simply have to fill out a form[1] to get surveillance data, and promise to lie about the source in court.
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140203/11143926078/paral...
In fact, its worse than cleartext SMS, when you use Signal you are a target, when you use cleartext SMS, you can still hide among the noise.
What messaging system would your recommend instead? Riot? Tox? Last I checked, neither were nearly as polished and feature-complete as Signal. In my use case, unless it is good enough to become a daily driver, many people won't even bother with it. What good is a messaging system that nobody else uses?
Telegram, cleartext SMS, email.
Normal people do not send anonymous or secure messages, but if you need and want to, then you cant just install an app and be done with it, you have to first find and install I2P which is not traceable to you (good luck, first get a degree in information security and become Linux guru), then join an I2P only IRC channel and begin messaging with your group of people about plan to watch football and drink beer, after you had the secret communication with bitmessage over I2P.
Why make it so easy for them?