this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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-33
Signal Facing Collapse After CIA Cuts Funding (kitklarenberg.substack.com)
submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology
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[–] [email protected] 86 points 9 months ago (2 children)

This article is ahistoric and unnecessarily conspirational.

Signal and its predecessors like TextSecure have been run by different companies/organizations:

  • Whisper Systems
  • Open Whisper Systems
  • Signal Technology Foundation (and its subsidiary Signal Messenger LLC)

Open Whisper Systems received about 3M USD total from the US government via the Open Technology Fund for the purpose of technology development … during 2013 to 2016. Source: archive of the OTF website: https://web.archive.org/web/20221015073552/https://www.opentech.fund/results/supported-projects/open-whisper-systems/

The Signal Foundation (founded 2018) was started by an 105M USD interest free loan from Brian Acton, known for co-founding WhatsApp and selling it to Facebook (now Meta).

So important key insights:

  • It doesn't seem like the Signal Foundation received US government funding. (Though I haven't checked financial statements.)
  • The US government funding seems to be a thing of the fairly distant past (2016). The article makes it sound like the funding was just pulled this year.
  • The US government funding was small compared to Signal's current annual budget. It was not small at the time, but now Signal regularly makes more from licensing its technology than it regularly received from the US government. According to ProPublica, Signals financial statements for 2022 indicate revenue of about 26M USD
[–] effward 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Thank you for sharing this!

One question: how can the loan from Brian Acton be interest free? I thought the federal government imposed minimum interest rates to prevent people from bypassing tax-free gifting limits.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

deleted

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

It doesn’t seem like the Signal Foundation received US government funding

The article doesn't say that Signal Foundation did, it says Signal did... which is well-documented in OTF's annual reports among other places.

I agree that this article has lots of other problems, though; I describe more in my comment about it in another thread.