this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
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Privacy
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the part of the "conspiracy theory" about CIA funding is completely true: signal proudly say they get funding from the OTF, which at the time signal started was a subsidiary of Radio Free Asia, which started out as an open CIA project (before being relaunched as clearly still a CIA project but without the official acknowledgement).
I'm 50:50 on whether signal is a literal honeypot, but even if not it seems pretty likely that the US government wouldn't have funded an app that could be used by people breaking its laws - let alone people actively organizing against it (foreign spies, domestic revolutionaries and insurrectionists) unless they were getting something pretty big in return.
In return they get an actually secure messing app they can use without having to support it themselves. Which is pretty big.