IE like Crypto AG:
In 2020, it was revealed that the Swiss company, Crypto AG, which provided secure communications services to ~120 governments throughout the 20th century, was secretly ran by the CIA and West German Intelligence. The CIA and later NSA were able to read encrypted communications for many countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Italy, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Jordan and South Korea.
Most likely all free vpns
Israeli actually, like express VPN
Signal I think. I don’t mean that the end2end algorithm or messaging itself are itself unsafe, the algo has been shown to be secure. This is what people usually rebuke this with, with the reminder of Signal’s OSS nature.
The issue the servers and the social networking data that can be harvested. The server code only partially exists in public and we just have to trust that that is actually what is running on whatever AWS server without tampering and self hosting is nearly impossible in practice if technically possible and nobody does it. The social network data (who talks to who) is more valuable than the actual messages logs, which give a massive, but mainly useless datasets. Until LLMs, like 10-15 years ago they were basically impossible to parse for any useful info without using large quantities of eye pairs. Basically if you are an organizer, criminal, government, part of a hunted opposition, you will leak the whole core group structure of your org with attached phone numbers. Whoever with that data can then target their devices and persons with other means. Plus it’s literally built on top of CIA money. I think signal is totally safe and adequate for friends and family type of use, but not much else, but then all in all so is whatsapp, mostly since signal and Whattsapp share the same end to end algorithm.
It’s funny how every poster who criticizes Signal inevitably makes a technical error. In your case, the claim that “Basically if you are an organizer, criminal, government, part of a hunted opposition, you will leak the whole core group structure of your org with attached phone numbers” entirely lacks basis. The Signal client - the OSS part we can and do control - does not divulge phone numbers.
You have this theory that Signal’s servers are storing communication records. (While there is no evidence to support this, it’s valuable to consider what they could do.) So the data that would be captured here is a network of hashed phone numbers and literally undecryptable messages. It’s impossible for the adversary to determine any phone numbers they don’t already know this way.
And since you can make a Signal account with a burner phone and create a “username”, even a known phone number becomes useless against targets who don’t want to be identified.
All speculation. You gave them your phone number (which also means your real identity), so you should assume they have it. And because its a US-based company, it must adhere to US laws including key disclosure laws, which make it illegal for any signal employee to tell you that any US government agency has asked for this information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter
So the data that would be captured here is a network of hashed phone numbers and literally undecryptable messages
With this data you can build social networking graphs: who is talking to who, and when.
Also this is all the more suspect when you consider that US military / government agencies like OTF fund signal, and constantly try to push signal in privacy spaces.
They could pull a Lavabit if presented with gag order, but of course, no way to know for sure how they would react.
All of the “delete my information from data brokers” services IMO, especially the ones that advertise on YouTube. Always smelled fishy to me.
Either that or they’re just more data brokers trying to get exclusivity.
This thread basically illustrates the challenges for a beginner, such as myself.
I’ve been locked into the Google ecosystem for nearly two decades and am now trying to free myself.
I’d like to migrate to a hybrid solution that involves self-hosted NextCloud synchronized with a cloud provider that I can trust more than Google.
However:
Proton apparently makes false, or at least misleading, marketing claims and doesn’t fight a vast majority of its inbound government requests.
Tuta has been publicly accused by a member of the intelligence community of being a honeypot.
The rest of the email providers seem to implement even fewer protections, relative to these two.
So, what’s a guy to do?
Now, to be clear, I’m not saying that either of these companies are bad or that I believe that they’re actually honeypots. I’m just trying to illustrate the challenges faced by newcomers (and probably all of us).
While I’d prefer to absolutely maximize privacy and security on all fronts, given that my first goal is de-googling, I will probably start with Proton and NextCloud and re-evaluate from there, but I’m open to suggestions.
Thank you all – I really appreciate this community.
Maybe not a honeypot, but definitely too large for my taste by now: Proton. With Mail, VPN, password manager, file storage, AI and whatnot, it’s one ginormous basket to put all of your eggs into, hoping it’ll hold.
Be careful of accepting some of the criticism of Signal in this thread. For most of us, we have to make choices about secure comms from subject matter experts. Almost all the criticism I see of Signal comes from anonymous or otherwise random users online. If you believe in such a thing as expertise, please seek it out when evaluating something like this.
Who are the experts, and who pays their salaries? Crypto AG wasn’t lacking in experts.
You’ll have to make your own determinations I guess, but be careful if you find yourself dismissing expertise in favor of opinion or motivated reasoning.
It is absolutely irrelevant who makes the criticism, what needs to be addressed is the criticism itself. If somebody gives you advice to simply trust people blindly then you should be very suspicious of their motivations.
Most issues are complex enough that we have to delegate trust. It’s not feasible to verify every claim yourself. And trust vs “blind trust” is an arbitrary line.
The issues people bring up with Signal are very easy for anybody with a minimally functioning brain to understand, and none of these experts are able to provide a credible answer to them.
The key issues people point out over and over is that Signal is a central server hosted in the US that harvests people’s phone numbers on sign up. The users are trusting server operators with their privacy at that point because there is no way to verify how this data is used. Since the server associates real identity with the account, it is in position to map out networks of people communicating. And if this data is shared with intelligence agencies, which they wouldn’t be allowed to disclose, then those can trivially correlate the personally identifiable information with all the other data they have access to.
If there’s a person of interest, and you map out whom that person wants to have private conversations with, that’s very useful data. Once you know that, then you can start tracking all the activities of their associates, and map out a whole network of people. Say, people organizing unions, or coordinating labor strikes, and so on.
This is an obvious problem with Signal, one that doesn’t take any significant expertise to understand, and one that has never been fully addressed. People talk about things like sealed sender, but that doesn’t address the problem I just outlined.
The core issue is that you have to trust the physical infrastructure rather than just the cryptography. The protocol design for sealed sender assumes the server behaves exactly as the published open source code dictates. A malicious operator can simply run modified server software that entirely ignores those privacy protections. Even if the cryptographic payload lacks a sender ID, the server still receives the raw network request and all the metadata attached to it. Your client has to talk to the server and identify itself before any messages are even sent.
When your device connects to send that sealed message, it inevitably reveals your IP address and connection timing to the server. The server also knows your IP address from when you initially registered your phone number or when you requested those temporary rate limiting tokens. By logging the raw incoming requests at the network level, a malicious server can easily correlate the IP address sending the sealed message with the IP address tied to the phone number.
Since the server must know the destination to route the message, it just links your incoming IP address to the recipient ID. Over time this builds a complete social graph of who is talking to whom. The cryptographic token merely proves you are allowed to send a message without explicitly stating who you are inside the payload. It does absolutely nothing to hide the metadata of the network connection itself from the machine receiving the data.
This once again makes it very suspicious that Signal insists on running a single centralized server.
Probably various VPNs on the market
Especially Israeli owned VPNs. Which seems to be most of them lately.
I always assume the more popular it is, the more likely it is of being compromised.
I have no idea if it’s the case, but I switched away from mullvad after seeing billboards and ads of it everywhere, even on city infrastructure like trains and buses.
if it makes you feel better i know an employee there and theyre a communist and say a lot of mullvad employees are lefties too, idk if they have a union or anything. nym vpn has chelsea manning backing it. not really a traditional vpn though its basically unfree tor that is not slow as balls, has the benefit of really good server coverage and few people blocking it. coolest thing is you can use a seedbox to route traffic to pay it down.
I know your example is the opposite, but any service that is run and hosted in the US.
It’s one of the major issues with Signal.
Not to mention Graphite and Pegasus, Israeli spyware.
When parliaments have to inquire their own spy services, it’s a sign that these spy services must be disbanded, as they are becoming a deep state of their own, intimidating and harassing politicians. After all, if you can’t trust your own politicians, whom can you? And that’s problematic.
Disbanding those services and prohibiting any secret services from ever forming, would also regain a great deal of trust of society in each other. And that trust in turn, can foster society to advance for mankind.
Dating apps.
Not a privacy app, but you should definitely not think anything said on discord is private in any sense whatsoever
beyond the obvious ones? signal.
proton is sus af with the fascist connections too, now that more of that news have come out lmao
i don’t think anyone here considers it a private service at all, but i’m almost certain cloudflare is a honeypot
Why are you so certain?
the biggest part is they’re doing way too much of the internet while being quite opaque. and their service is “too generous”, with free tiers, no ads. and the whole MITMing every traffic and serving from CDN architecture seems ideal for a honeypot to me.
even if cloudflare themselves don’t intend to be one, i’m pretty sure some three letter agency has backdoors to their systems.
Bitcoin.
Hell, monero is the only crypto I think isn’t a honeypot, since so many exchanges refuse to list it. That could just be how the government wants us to think though 🤔
It’s not even that Bitcoin is a honeypot, it’s that it isn’t actually private at all, and through good ol detective work a wallet can be connected to a person, as well as their inflows and outflows and what wallets they’re sending or receiving money from.
