Signal's Hidden Ties: Scrutinizing Its Government Links and Ideological Leadership

It has become the world messaging app for dissenters. The app has been downloaded more than 100 million times and graced with endorsements by NSA leaker Edward Snowden and serial entrepreneur Elon Musk.

The role that Signal plays in the world has contributed to the perception of its users that political dissidents such as them can communicate with one another safely, out of the interception and persecution reach of the state.

However, a few things in this insider history of Signal raise questions, starting with the app's roots and how it really came to work with the government. Whether the American intelligence apparatus is involved is what brings in troubling signals for us, given what much of the world has learned in recent years about widespread efforts to restrict information and its dissemination by technology companies, sometimes in cahoots with American government officials.

The technology underpinning Signal, which operates as a nonprofit foundation, was seeded early on with some of the first infusion of capital in the company's history: a $3 million grant from the government-sponsored Open Technology Fund.

The Open Technology Fund, a grantmaking organization, was spun off from Radio Free Asia and seeded with $50 million allocated by Congress under the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

Signal is one of the donors to OTF; the communist messaging service during the Cold War, which funded the development of "encrypted mobile communications tools" for "defenders of internet freedom around the world."

Some insiders have gone so far as to say that the ties between OTF and the U.S. intelligence community are closer than they seem. One source with deep experience working with OTF, who asked to remain unnamed, told BuzzFeed News that after a while, it was becoming more apparent that

"the project was actually a State Department-connected initiative that planned to wield open source Internet projects made by hacker communities as tools for American foreign policy goals," including by empowering "activists, parties opposed to governments that the USA doesn't like."

Whatever the merits of such efforts, the claim—if true—suggests a government involvement with Signal that deserves more scrutiny.

Other potential issues would concern the current chairwoman of the board for the Signal Foundation: Katherine Maher, who started her career as an agent of U.S.-funded regime-change operations. For example, during the Arab Spring years, Maher worked on the National Democratic Institute's digital-communications projects in the Middle East and North Africa.

The NDI is nominally an NGO but is largely funded by the government and works in unison with U.S. foreign policy on behalf of American goals. Maher built relations with internet dissidents and utilized American technologies to advance U.S. government-backed Color Revolutions abroad.

Maher went on to be CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation and, earlier this year, was chosen to be CEO of National Public Radio. At Wikipedia, she became a campaigner against "disinformation" and admitted she worked to coordinate online censorship "through conversations with government."

She openly endorsed removing alleged "fascists," including President Trump, from digital platforms, and described the First Amendment as "the number one challenge" to eliminating "bad information." The insider said it was a woman, Meredith Whittaker—who in 2022 became president of the Signal Foundation—who recruited Maher to be board chair, in large part because of their mutual connections to the OTF, where Maher is also an advisor, and to NGOs like Access Now, which "defends and extends the digital rights of users at risk around the world, including in the Middle East and North Africa."

Whittaker, like Maher, is highly ideological. She previously worked in a high position at Google and organized left-wing campaigns within the company, culminating in the 2018 "Google Walkout" that demanded MeToo-style sexual harassment policies and the hiring of a chief diversity officer.

So what does all this mean for American users—including conservative dissidents—who believe that Signal is a secure application for communication? It means that they should be cautious.

"Maher's presence on the board of Signal is alarming," says national security analyst J. Michael Waller. "

It makes sense that a Color Revolutionary like Maher would have interest in Signal as a secure means of communicating," he says,

but her past support for censorship and apparent intelligence connections raise doubts about Signal's trustworthiness.

David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the popular Ruby on Rails web-development framework, agrees, saying that it had "suddenly become materially harder" to trust the Signal Foundation under Maher's board leadership.

For anyone who values a free and open internet, the role that Maher will play for Signal is a glaring red flag. After all, this is someone who has admitted that she gave up on the project of an open and free internet with Wikipedia because those values reproduced a "white male westernized construct" and because they "did not end up living into the intentionality of what openness can be."

According to her perspective, the superior alternative involves managed opinion, which alternately censors and promotes dissent—depending upon context and goal—as the two indispensable methods. We are entering an incredibly dangerous period of political technology, and Maher is right there with it.

Under her ideology, "Internet Freedom" is a tactic, not a principle, and "fighting disinformation" means speech suppression right here at home. Believe people when they tell you who they are.