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Comment by xster | Hacker News Reader

Take this with a grain of salt since it's not too clear how much money they got exactly from OTF, but they seem to have been partially seeded initially with the CIA spin-off Radio Free Asia money (https://pando.com/2015/03/01/internet-privacy-funded-by-spoo...).

Since the OTF's own spin-off from RFA, it seems to have continued being non-trivially involved in regime change while funding communication initiatives like TOR and Open Whisper Systems etc (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Technology_Fund).

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Good. Let them put their "regime change" money into generally useful infrastructure like Signal instead of propaganda for their favorite rebel group or some other narrow political goal.

Signal runs on AWS with the excuse that if a state actor decided to block Signal by blocking IPs, they would have to block all of AWS.

It all sounds fine, until we are reminded that AWS itself blocked Parler, no chance of recourse and completely within the law. With that in mind, how confident are you to think that CIA's support of Signal goes as far as they can ensure they can control the network?

The threat model for prevention of censoring Signal was originally developed around China, Best Korea, etc.

The original reasoning why WhatsApp used the same crypto/messaging format as Signal was in large part (aside from it being Good Crypto) to make it harder to selectively block TextSecure/Signal based on message content.

So the threat model is now changing (if you're trying to avoid censorship by the US govt etc) and that's going to be interesting to watch unfold. Matrix is much less susceptible to this being an existential threat, of course.

And since the first in the thread asked about money, which is an important question, Amazon has a 600 million dollar CIA contract before counting the billions in IC contracts this year to big tech. That's more than double what Bezos paid for the whole Washington Post to put things into perspective.

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