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submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by maniacalmanicmania@aussie.zone to c/australia@aussie.zone

Signal president Meredith Whittaker is prepared to withdraw the privacy-focused messaging app from Australia — saying she hopes it doesn’t become a “gangrenous foot” by poisoning its entire platform by forcing it to hand over its users’ encrypted data to authorities.

Ms Whittaker says Signal would take the “drastic step” of leaving any market where a government compelled it to create a “backdoor” to access its data, saying it would create a vulnerability that hackers and authoritative regimes could exploit, undermining Signals’ “reason for existing”.

Pressure has been mounting on Signal and other secure messaging platforms. ASIO director general Mike Burgess has urged tech companies to unlock encrypted messages to assist terrorism and national security investigations, saying offshore extremists use such platforms to communicate.

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[-] naught101@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago

I can totally see Australian politics being OK with signal leaving, since that would push users on to other less secure/more compliant apps

[-] shads@lemy.lol 12 points 1 day ago

You might be right, but its going to get harder for them to crow about the wins ASIO is making when competent people are spinning up more bespoke solutions they have even less hope of compromising. Plus when people go down the current path that the UK populace is what are ASIO going to claim next, VPNs have to be banned. You know Australia lacks the technical competence to implement that correctly, suddenly every business is having their workflow broken to appease a bunch of "intelligence" wonks. The further they over reach the more likely they will trip themselves up.

[-] naught101@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

A messaging app is extremely hard to "spin up bespoke solutions" for, because a solution's success is 99% dependent on the network effect.

Perhaps when a protocol like signal but decentralised is available, then we might be able to say that.

[-] brisk@aussie.zone 6 points 1 day ago

There are already a bunch of them, including XMPP and Matrix which both implement Signal's double ratchet encryption (via OMEMO, in XMPPs case)

[-] Whostosay@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

Veilid comes to mind as well, still a work in progress

[-] shads@lemy.lol 1 points 1 day ago

I've certainly played with Matrix, got voice working but video was a struggle (I may have just stuffed up my STUN server install). Yet again this is an area that organised crime, terrorist groups etc have it easier, they can dictate what their members use rather than relying upon persuasion to get them onboard. I am pretty certain that the NSA have people dedicated to infiltrating these sorts of small scale chat apps, but like everything else who knows how many are actually in the wild and just have good enough opsec to avoid that infiltration (and yes how many they let stay open for intelligence purposes).

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this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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