“Signal is being blocked in Venezuela and Russia. The app is a popular choice for encrypted messaging and people trying to avoid government censorship, and the blocks appear to be part of a crackdown on internal dissent in both countries…”

  • Railcar8095@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    Yeah. Telegram, should be next, there’s a huge risk with it too. And email! Social networks too, just in case. And postal mail, we can’t forget that. We should crack down any form of uncensored communication.

    All for the benefit of the people, of course. \s

    • Novman@feddit.it
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      4 months ago

      In UK don’t ban them, but jail you if they don’t like your posts, more democratic.

      • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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        4 months ago

        While I don’t live in the UK I do believe they have protections on free speech.

        If you are concerned you can always hide your identity.

        • Novman@feddit.it
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          4 months ago

          I’m not living in uk, i live in italy. I saw every kind of comment written on italian social networks and i have never seen a conviction. When the police had taken the names of protesters, ( not arrested ) we had a public outcry. We had arrest for direct call for violence, not simply rants. So seeing people jailed for rants on twitter scares me. We have actual fascists and communists, both parties were strong, and we had an actual civil war. We have strong linguistic minorities and regional parties. So a lot of people hating each other. Who decide the right speech in such a situation?

            • Novman@feddit.it
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              4 months ago

              And normaly it is very difficult to be comdemned for a generic rant. It is easier in case of insults or defamtion, but it is mostly an high fee. Jailing a political adversary for a speech ( when we had a lot of political/mafia killing in the past ) is a big no. We had actual people killed for their speech.

          • ivn@jlai.lu
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            4 months ago

            Are people really jailed for rants in the UK? I’ve only seen stories of actual call to violence.

            • Novman@feddit.it
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              4 months ago

              The line between rants and call for violence is quite blurred in some cases IMHO

              • ivn@jlai.lu
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                4 months ago

                Can you give an exemple of such case in the recent events in the UK?

                  • ivn@jlai.lu
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                    4 months ago

                    So she has been arrested, not jailed. We don’t know much about this specific case yet but this has nothing to do with a rant, like you said.

      • Railcar8095@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        I’m not aware of the kingdom of whataboutistan. Is it related to this post somehow?

        • Novman@feddit.it
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          4 months ago

          Yes, different kind of censorship in the world. A more broad vision.

          • Railcar8095@lemm.ee
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            4 months ago

            Keep going, then. Any other country to mention, seeing how it’s important to you? Russia? China? Italy? India? Pakistan?

            I somehow feel your “broad” is actually quite narrow. Usually happens with the whatabautisms

            • Novman@feddit.it
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              4 months ago

              Why going so long when we have a near, english-speaking , clean example of a country famous for the free speech. If you have the highest example of human rights why check the rest.

              • Railcar8095@lemm.ee
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                4 months ago

                So much from broadening… As soon as I mention any other suddenly there’s no point checking other countries.

      • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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        4 months ago

        The current president of Signal is also still happy to do interviews with US-defense-oriented think tanks like Lawfare.

        They probably still are funded by USIntel, considering how interested RFA was in pushing Signal in privacy-oriented spaces.

      • Railcar8095@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        Unrelated to what the previous person is saying (banned because it was used by dissidents), but still, we have the source code. If you’re arguing they are somehow accessing the data, what’s encrypted and what isn’t is known.

        • RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          4 months ago

          Signal knows who you are taking to. You can build a network of contacts based on that information. When you send messages your phone number is protected but your ip address is not, and the receivers phone number is not protected. So you can find two people chatting based on that information. The app automatically sends a delivery receipt when a message is received to the other user, exposing the senders phone number and IP address.

          However, opposition in the country is backed by western agencies and NGOs, and likely their primary means of communication is signal since it’s backed by western intelligence, meaning, western actors believe it to be safe from external interference.

          I’m not arguing that the west is reading messages. I’m arguing that they believe it’s a safe haven for their agents because they pay money to ensure it’s safe for their agents. If it wasn’t, they wouldn’t use it. Its the same reason why the intelligence community in the west is a large supporter of the tor network. They use it in the field and operate their own exit nodes to protect their operations.

          • Railcar8095@lemm.ee
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            4 months ago

            That’s what you fail to understand. It’s open source, it has been audited. Venezuela and any other country can check and crack the encryption if has holes in it. The long first paragraph is something that’s not a secret, but widely known.

            You know what’s also safe? Encrypted emails. VPNs. Matrix.

            If you think this is a movement against foreign agents, you should think it’s useless too. For a sufficiently motivated agent, this will be trivial to overcome. For the general population? Not so much.

            Unless next all forms of private communication re forbidden, of curse. Surely what people on a privacy community advocate for.

              • Railcar8095@lemm.ee
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                4 months ago

                Which ones? Signal? Likely. Secure mail and VPN? For sure. Can “foreign agents” use them? Certainly.

                Who will have a hard time to use them? General population. Signal is the privacy communication service with the lowest barrier to entry, in terms of cost and setup complexity. Not a tool for spies, but for average Joe.

                What service do you recommend BTW? That ensures government cannot snoop and prevents “foreign agents”. It seems that any privacy is a risk, so I’m curious what a privacy minded person thinks should be OK.

                  • Railcar8095@lemm.ee
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                    4 months ago

                    Yeah, I don’t know. Do you? It’s a fair assumption they use email, right? And VPN is standard in most organizations. I never even mentioned the opposition. Dissidents can be non affiliated people, who is discontent with their government or feel oppressed.

                    Why is it relevant? I thought you were interested about foreign agents? Or is all the opposition foreign agents?

                    Please tell me, should it be possible to have privacy from the government in Venezuela? If so, how? If you only answer one thing, please do this one.

    • D61 [any]@hexbear.net
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      4 months ago

      Self defense is self defense, would we expect some different behavior from a country being attacked from outside interests with publicly accessible end to end encryption services?

      • Railcar8095@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        Publicly accessible: reviewed and audited by hundreds of teams that confirmed there’s no backdoor. Venezuelan, Russian and Chinese governments didn’t find the holes, even having access to the code. If they did, they would be exploiting it to… reeducate.

        Yeah, I would expect to trust that. Still, you said yourself, the problem is that is used by dissidents. And we can’t have that, right?

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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      4 months ago

      We can’t have individual thinkers running around can we. We need a shared vision that is dictated from the top down.

      • Railcar8095@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        For their own good. Individual thinkers tend to have short lives. Just look how many people thinked themselves of a window in Russia on the last year.