Signal vs. Telegram
BLUF: Signal, obviously.
We need to talk about PSTN replacement applications, because there’s some influence operations foolishness in this area that is getting on my last telecom engineer’s nerve.
Attention Conservation Notice:
Signal is developmentally and operationally fine. Wire is developmentally fine, I just grew weary of the 75% failure rate on voice calls. Telegram should be treated as an FSB tentacle. Threema solves problems I never encounter by introducing an endless pain in the ass during every moment it’s active.
Background:
I discovered Wire in 2017, concurrent with leaving behind some juvenile behavior and the associated platforms that were a legacy of 2012. When I say “2012” that’s shorthand - that year is to hackers what Woodstock was to hippies. Those who arrived after the fact just weren’t there, and there’s no cure for that deficit.
Wire was great the first couple years, but as their corporate practice grew their care for the free users diminished. Voice calls went to hell and we still soldiered on for a couple years, because there were a LOT of rooms on the platform. My interest in interacting with anonymous parties declined precipitously and I think … 2021 was the year I’d had enough. I am an instigator of such stature that I can decide on a change like abandoning a platform and make it stick.
I tried a number of things, but Signal worked with Google Voice numbers, which eliminated the bounty hunter dox problem. And since they added the ability to create a name plus two digits for a handle, the only thing Wire still has on them is better file handling in group rooms.
Threema is favored by Ukrainian intel. The fact that the phone you use for it must be both on AND on network when using the desktop app made this an instant FOAD for me. There are simply far too many situations where the origin phone for a Signal number is stashed somewhere while the desktop install is in use.
Telegram was a Russian company. I don’t find their relocation at all convincing. Their encryption has always used solid algorithms but often in a procedurally questionable fashion. The only number I’ve ever admitted to having for Telegram, 706-47-TROLL, was known to an aspie retard, a schizophrenic scene whore, and a disbarred attorney in need of a med check. They’d put me into rooms, I’d ignore them, they’d kick me, I’d keep ignoring them, so they’d add me again. That went on for the better part of a year, then Telegram fumbled the account and they’ve never managed to reset it. If you’re doing anything more with Telegram than ignoring fuckups … well … birds of a feather.
Roles:
Signal, Threema, and Wire are secure communication platforms. There are other tools that get used - chat systems like IRC and Jabber came and went. I still have a Matrix account. Session is nice but it never got momentum in my circles. Slack has its niches, none of which I’ve been in for years. I have at least one Discord account but as a mildly autistic adult I find it akin to an integrated tablet/pinball machine. I will occasionally appear there, but only under extreme duress. And that was prior to the Spy Pet nonsense, a cyberstalker app that I’ve heard is actually connected to Kiwi Farms.
So … don’t use apps that provide liberal access to assclowns like Josh Moon … or his boss, Alexander Bortnikov.
Telegram’s positioning is a bit unusual - it’s got secure communication platform features, but it’s also got a lot of Twitter style y’all come social networking. Back during the great ISIS hunt of 2014-2015, people who were into that watched the app like hawks, because ISIS channels would open for a couple hours, then seal up for good. This was the method operators employed to keep their groups more or less together, while shaking pursuers.
Signal Smear:
Starting back in October there was a concerted effort to smear Signal. I felt the need to boost Jackie Singh’s advice on what to do in Relay Your Signal Calls.
Six weeks later an associate came to me with an article by a tankie twerp insinuating that Signal was some CIA scheme. Signal Funding & Kit Klarenberg was my debunking of that silliness. They weren’t taken in by him in the first place, I just added some technical weight to what they already thought.
I started a post here on May 7th that referenced an article by Chris Rufo, one of the larger turds floating in the Twitter right wing cesspool. I didn’t finish it because there was other stuff to do and I’m not going to dignify that junk by giving it a working backlink. If you’ve read, understood, and INTERNALIZED Stop Ingesting Crap you’re free to cut and paste this.
https://www.city-journal[.]org/article/signals-katherine-maher-problem
I read with great interest How a smear campaign against NPR led Elon Musk to feud with Signal by Renee DiResta. There’s nothing ridiculously wrong with the article and in particular this part resonated for me.
Rufo’s post relied heavily on a particular smear tactic: the Transitive Property of Bad People, which connects people and institutions in a daisy chain of guilt by association. The smear’s power lies in insinuation, expecting the reader to connect the dots without explicit accusations that could invite defamation suits.
Renee has worked for New Knowledge/Yonder, as have two of my fellow travelers from the aforementioned “2012”. She gets the TPBP treatment bigly.
But closing the loop on this, we come back to Jackie Singh again, with her analysis of DiResta’s piece in The Guardian. She initially boosted it, then someone pointed out that DiResta benefits from Peter Thiel’s patronage. This work is important enough that I’m surprised it’s not an article on Jackie’s Hacking But Legal, so I’m going to reprint the whole thing here, with just a few formatting changes so what she did on Twitter is clear here.
After carefully examining the article, a few key strategies stand out:
Portraying Musk as a well-intentioned victim of a smear campaign.
The article opens by framing the debate around Signal vs. Telegram as "an esoteric debate" that only came to broader attention due to X's "most notorious capability: mutating isolated facts into viral conspiracy theories for the entertainment of rage-riddled crowds." This depicts Musk as an innocent party caught up in a manufactured controversy driven by bad faith actors, rather than someone who actively promoted unsubstantiated claims about Signal's security on his massive platform.
Minimizing and excusing Musk's role in amplifying the conspiracy theory:
When the article does acknowledge Musk's own tweets claiming "known vulnerabilities with Signal," it downplays their impact. Musk is described as simply seeing and adding to "insinuations" made by others, with the article noting "It's understandable that ordinary people who shared the claims found Rufo's smear job persuasive" since "the technical aspects are complex." This frames Musk as just another misled person taken in by persuasive allegations, rather than a highly influential and reportedly intelligent figure with a responsibility to vet claims before spreading them to his massive audience.
Shifting blame to Musk's detractors and rival tech figures:
The article devotes significant space to detailing the "smear campaign" against Katherine Maher and tying it to the Signal controversy, painting figures like Chris Rufo as the primary drivers of the narrative. It also calls out Jack Dorsey and Pavel Durov for "boost[ing] the allegations" and "us[ing] it for their ends," respectively, placing more emphasis on their actions than Musk's own role in pushing the story.
Ending with a call to support the targets of bad-faith attacks and understand smear campaigns:
The article concludes by advocating for people to "support the targets of bad-faith attacks" and for institutions to "learn to understand how these efforts work and, rather than staying silent, should speak up promptly" - implicitly aligning Musk with the targets of smears who should be supported. By finishing with a broader point about recognizing "recurring rhetorical tricks, tropes and lack of evidence" in smear campaigns, the author shifts focus away from critically examining Musk's specific actions in this case.
Overall, while the article acknowledges that Musk made unsupported claims about Signal's security, it ultimately works to minimize his culpability, portray him as a victim of coordinated smears, and refocus attention on the misdeeds of his critics and rivals.
This piece in The Guardian exemplifies how strategic framing and subtle rhetorical choices can be used to shape an event's narrative to favor a particular figure, even in an ostensibly 'objective' analysis.
Conclusion:
Prior to someone forwarding me DiResta’s piece, quickly followed by Jackie’s dismantling of it, if you had asked I would have said something along the lines of …
Signal is objectively trustworthy and it’s a pain in the ass for U.S. law enforcement when used in an appropriate fashion. There has been a lot of reporting about data recovered from Signal in connection with January 6th, but that was due to poor tradecraft and criminality on the part of those using it. Telegram has always actually had the intel problem ascribed to Signal, only from the Russian side. My read on this pressure is that influence ops in general feel that they’re able to better herd folks congregating on Telegram than Signal. And that’s before factoring in the Russian intel visibility.
Having read Jackie on the larger context, the presence of Chris Rufo with another misogynist attack on a woman in charge of an institution perceived as liberal makes a LOT more sense. I’m glad she delivered the coup de bonk on this problem.
Epilogue:
Signal is fine, just Relay Your Signal Calls.
There isn’t Another Reason To Get GrapheneOS in this article, but if you’re truly worried and want to tool up for dangerous places, get a Pixel 8.
