cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/56591279
Swedish government wants a back door in signal for police and ‘Säpo’ (Swedish federation that checks for spies)
Let’s say that this becomes a law and Signal decides to withdraw from Sweden as they clearly state that they won’t implement a back door; would a citizen within the country still be able to use and access Signals services? Assuming that google play services probably would remove the Signal app within Sweden (which I also don’t use)
I just want the government to go f*ck themselves, y’know?
Bro i just moved here, stop going to shit please
Welcome. Where from?
Shithole called hungary… had no choice at this point, my sister is trans so we kinda escaped that place. Thankfully hungary is eu so it was easy to move here. Pretty nice so far apart from even this place slowly turning to the right but every country is doing that right now…
If privacy will be taken from ordinary citizens, only criminals will enjoy true privacy.
I like you Sweden but you can go fuck yourself in this particular scenario
Classic right-wing government doing dumb right-wing government shit. Hopefully we can flush these ghouls out by next election. They barely managed to cross the line last election, and through their deep incompetency have been continuously falling in the polls.
You can just install the app from apk if that should happen
Ah good, it had become to easy to convince my friends to let me message them on Signal.
Signal has already said they’d “leave Sweden first”.
But what does that mean today, when the Internet is non-local, and I can run my own VPN with Wireguard or Tailscale?
That just means they don’t offer their service there officially and don’t offer support
But what does that mean today
The first thing you need to understand is: if any government is demanding a back door to a messenger in the name of law enforcement, they are lying. It is simple as that.
Everybody spending more than 10 seconds on the subject knows that there are hundreds of alternatives out there. And somebody actually needing a way to keep illegal activities hidden will just switch over to something else.
There is only one reason to push for such an idea (and always for the popular messenger options of course): Wanting to surveil ordinary citizens that don’t think much about which platform they use. Because everyone else will be gone from the platform in the blink of an eye.
So this means exactly nothing for you if you want to keep using Signal. Because they won’t stop you and they won’t care. You are not the target if you actually think about consequences. They aim at the majority that will just move on to the next popular mainstream option over time once Signal isn’t available in the domestic app store anymore… hopefully (or not… depending on your perspective) to an option that will not resist demands for an backdoor when the time comes.
Signal’s encryption was great. Still, for some years now they are not 100% open source and they still advertise themselves as open source.
What part am I missing? They seem to have the source code of their server and the different apps on their GitHub page.
There isn’t any proof that the app you download is built exactly from the source code on github. There could be an intermediate step to inject whatever they want before packaging it for the app stores.
There’s also the conspiracy that Signal has been compromised since the beginning as they received initial funding from the CIA. Not sure exactly where I stand on this, but it is plausible.
The protocol itself is open source though so someone could make an open source service with that.
