Did everybody just straight up forget about the NSA data collection center in Utah or wherever?

The capability was literally to record the internet. All the data, all the time.

Between that and fusion centers using data they can just straight up buy from everyone they can build a picture of who you are, who you talk to, where you drive, how often you speed, what you're looking for online...

If it is electronically transmissible it is not private and you should assume gmen are reading it.

I work in embedded software, if it has a processor and an antenna you cannot trust it. You must assume that it is either already compromised or could be.

Basically return to nature.

room 641a still around

As an aside, I'm very much convinced that Signal's primary objective is to gather phone numbers in order to facilitate the US government tracing social networks of people who are already of interest Their main focus isn't on what these people are discussing, they want to know who is talking to whom first and foremost. Signal's subpar user experience is a feature from this perspective. Due to its inconvenience for the average person, those with a strong need or desire to communicate sensitive information are more likely to utilize it.

It's so, so much easier just to track iMessage or RCS or SMS (where you can get content as well) than to create a third party app, hide your money trail and create two versions of the source code and maintain both the fake (with sealed sender) and the real, harvesting one all while avoiding your own subpoenas and paying off countless auditors.

idk about Signal but Matrix is 100% a metadata harvesting op and it always disappoints me when people recommend it

incubated at a Canadian telco that's a known Mossad metadata harvesting front, that just happens to notoriously leak metadata when federated.