On November 16th, Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal, published a detailed breakdown of the popular encrypted messaging app’s running costs for the very first time. The unprecedented disclosure’s motivation was simple - the platform is rapidly running out of money, and in dire need of donations to stay afloat. Unmentioned by Whittaker, this budget shortfall results in large part due to the US intelligence community, which lavishly financed Signal’s creation and maintenance over several years, severing its support for the app.

On November 16th, Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal, published a detailed breakdown of the popular encrypted messaging app’s running costs for the very first time. The unprecedented disclosure’s motivation was simple - the platform is rapidly running out of money, and in dire need of donations to stay afloat. Unmentioned by Whittaker, this budget shortfall results in large part due to the US intelligence community, which lavishly financed Signal’s creation and maintenance over several years, severing its support for the app.

Never acknowledged in any serious way by the mainstream media, Signal’s origins as a US government asset are a matter of extensive public record, even if the scope and scale of the funding provided has until now been secret. The app, brainchild of shadowy tech guru ‘Moxie Marlinspike’ (real name Matthew Rosenfeld), was launched in 2013 by his now-defunct Open Whisper Systems (OWS). The company never published financial statements or disclosed the identities of its funders at any point during its operation.

Sums involved in developing, launching and running a messaging app used by countless people globally were nonetheless surely significant. The newly-published financial records indicate Signal’s operating costs for 2023 alone are $40 million, and projected to rise to $50 million by 2025. Rosenfeld boasted in 2018 that OWS “never [took] VC funding or sought investment” at any point, although mysteriously failed to mention millions were provided by Open Technology Fund (OTF).

OTF was launched in 2012 as a pilot program of Radio Free Asia (RFA), an asset of US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which is funded by US Congress to the tune of over $1 billion annually. In August 2018, its then-CEO openly acknowledged the Agency’s “global priorities…reflect US national security and public diplomacy interests.”

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  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.ml
    2·
    1 year ago

    I have mixed feelings about this article. It gets some stuff right, but also some stuff wrong and it misses some important details.

    • I don’t think Signal has actually received money from OTF (Radio Free Asia) since 2015 or so; if it needed any today it would likely get it from one of the less transparent US government internet freedom funding vehicles. There is no indication they are “facing collapse” beyond a blog post talking about their expenses and soliciting donations.
    • This article mentions “over a billion” people repeatedly, but doesn’t explain that number is actually referring to WhatsApp (which uses the encryption protocol developed by Signal). Signal says they have 40 million active users.
    • It doesn’t mention that Brian Acton (billionaire WhatsApp founder) gave them a $50M interest-free loan when he co-founded the Signal Foundation with Moxie in 2018, and became its “executive chairman” or whatever. That “loan” had increased to over $100M by the end of 2018, and is presumably much larger today.
    • It doesn’t mention that Signal Foundation president Meredith Whittaker worked at Google for over a decade, and co-founded a department there that worked alongside OTF on various internet freedom projects (and was later on the OTF advisory board herself)
    • it doesn’t mention the salient properties of Signal which actually make it particularly beneficial to US interests (keeping the communications of privacy-desiring people associated with their phone numbers while concentrating their metadata on Amazon servers)