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@ecosamics @marcohoffmann the problem is it's hard enough to get people off of things like Facebook messenger, which have far, far worse issues.

Note that Trump has cut off government funding for Signal, right after Elon Musk's DOGE got slapped for using it in violation of the Freedom of Information Act or some other open records provision.

Why would a government fund a rather opaque encryption app that is open-source and thus difficult to backdoor? Because almost every government has other governments as state level enemies, and usually they like to support dissidents in each other's lands as a cheap mode of low intensity warfare.

Example: the better Tor works in China, the more weaker the Chinese Capitalist Party (a rival to the US) gets.

This relationship of adversity between regimes can benefit dissidents. During the Cold War, the CIA aided insurgents in Eastern Europe, while the KGB helped pull the rug out from underneath US backed Fascist regimes in Central and South America. The net effect of these opposing interventions was to strenghten resistance to both empires at the expense of introducing some very unsavory politics.

Worst of all in that aspect was Reagan's support for theocrats over secular opponents of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. From that the world got al-Qaeda and worst of all, Daesh. NYC got the twin towers levelled as another effect of that.

None the less, many US backed fash regimes fell in Central and South America, and the Soviet bloc fell apart entirely. Unfortunately the US didn't go down with the Soviet Union, but the USSR was the weaker of the two empires so this was no surprise.