Flash mob protests for 5-10 minutes then meet at a new location for the next one.
Cops can't be everywhere and agent provocateurs would have to be on the inside.
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
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Privacy
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Go get involved and you’ll see pretty quick how people generally handle organizing. They’ll be some kind of low stakes event like a reading or art gallery or concert or something and people will say “come out to this protest tomorrow”.
If there’s a signal or something it’s not usually a necessary link.
All that is to say: don’t use computers to organize. If you want to use social media to raise awareness of an event that’s a different thing altogether.
I think Signal is the best. The flaws you mentioned are valid for some threat models, but now when organizing a protest.
Signal has phone number privacy, so goverment can not link any accounts to any phone numbers. At most they will know you registered Signal.
Yes, it's centralized, but if the only threat actor you worry about is your goverment, then Signal will do just fine. They can not hand over any meaningful data on anyone because of metadata protection.
Protests that upset the US federal government are serious business. Garden-variety privacy won’t do.
I don't agree with the overall logic of that first article. It makes a huge assumption that the CIA has influenced Signal, but as with F-Droid (who just received a grant from the same OTF), the funds go from Congress to the USAGM (formerly RFA) to OTF to regular folk, nonprofits, charities, etc.
The OTF is an independent nonprofit corporation, with its own set of board members, and they make their own decisions. Could they all be bought by the CIA to secretly fund backdoors in open source projects? I suppose, but that would be a possibility fallacy to imply: because it could, it therefore is.
Lots of money moves around the government, and even it doesn't always know where it all goes. People should be able to make informed choices, but paranoia and tinfoil aren't going to help anyone.
I also like how the “good alternatives” blog post shows a bunch of apps that basically have “less secure”, “not compatible” or “unstable” as caveats. Signal is (for now) still gold standard for messaging apps overall.
It's also stupid easy to set up. I got my whole family to switch in two days.
I like the way SimpleX does everything much more, with the anonymous contact tokens, but Signal is still open source and doing things like local-only storage, ephemeral chats, password protection for the app, etc.
It's fair to keep an eye on any service that's centralized, but thus far, it's probably the best option out there for people who aren't technically-minded or otherwise don't have the patience to get into the weeds of some of those other apps.
SimpleX, try actually doing it and you'll find out pretty quick.