I think Dessalines most recent comment is fair even if it’s harsh. You should understand the nature of a “national security letter” to have the context. The vast majority of (USA) government requests are NSLs because they require the least red tape. When you receive one, it’s illegal to disclose that you have, and not to comply. It requires you to share all metadata you have, but they routinely ask for more.

Here’s an article that details the CIA connection https://www.kitklarenberg.com/p/signal-facing-collapse-after-cia

The concern doesn’t stem from the CIA funding. It’s inherit to all services operating in or hosted in the USA. They should be assumed compromised by default, since the laws of that country require them to be. Therefore, any app you trust has to be completely unable to spy on you. Signal understands this, and uses it in their marketing. But it isn’t true, they’ve made decisions that allow them to spy on you, and ask that you trust them not to. Matrix, XMPP and SimpleX cannot spy on you by design. (It’s possible those apps were made wrong, and therefore allow spying, but that’s a different argument).

How does that work? I wasn’t able to find this. Can you find documentation or code that explains how the client can obscure where it came from?

Yes.

Your client talks to their server, their server talks to your friend’s client. They don’t accept third party apps. The server code is open source, not a secret. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t 99% the open source code, with a few privacy breaking changes. Or that the server software runs exactly as implied, but that that is moot since other software also runs on the same servers and intercepts the data.

We can’t verify that. They have a vested interest in lying, and occasionally are barred from disclosing government requests. However, using this as evidence, as I suggested in my previous comment, we can use it to make informed guesses as to what data they can share. They can’t share the content of the message or calls – This is believable and assumed. But they don’t mention anything surrounding the message, such as whom they sent it to (and it is them who receives and sends the messages), when, how big it was, etc. They say they don’t have access to your contact book – This is also very likely true. But that isn’t the same as not being able to provide a social graph, since they know everyone you’ve spoken to, even if they don’t know what you’ve saved about those people on your device. They also don’t mention anything about the connection they might collect that isn’t directly relevant to providing the service, like device info.

Think about the feasibility of interacting with feds in the manner they imply. No extra communication to explain that they can’t provide info they don’t have? Even though they feel the need to communicate that to their customers. Of course this isn’t the extent of the communication, or they’d be in jail. But they’re comfortable spinning narratives. Consider their whole business is dependant on how they react to these requests. Do you think it’s likely their communication of how they handled it is half-truths?

Used by a bunch of NATO armies isn’t the same as promoted by or made by. It just means they trust Element not to share their secrets. And that blog post is without merit. The author discredits Matrix because it has support for unencrypted messaging. That’s not a negative, it’s just a nice feature for when it’s appropriate. Whereas Signal’s major drawback of requiring your government ID and that you only use their servers is actually grounds to discredit a platform. Your post is the crossed arms furry avatar equivalent of “I drew you as the soyjack”. The article has no substance on the cryptographic integrity of Matrix, because there’s nothing to criticise there.

Sure. You can trust your own fork. Just don’t use the official repos or their servers. The client isn’t where the danger is.

Your link lists all the things they don’t share. The only reasonable reading is that anything not explicitly mentioned is shared. It’s information they have, and they’re legally required to share what they have, also mentioned in your link in the documents underneath their comment.

Your data is routed through Signal servers to establish connections. Signal absolutely can does provide social graphs, message frequency, message times, message size. There’s also nothing stopping them from pushing a snooping build to one user when that user is targeted by the NSA. The specific user would need to check all updates against verified hashes. And if they’re on iOS then that’s not even an option, since the official iOS build hash already doesn’t match the repo.

It’s not my friends I want to hide my number from, it’s Signal.

Signal is USA government approved. Definitely don’t trust it. Use Matrix.