Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947
I agree that in practice, a lot of people are going to use their phones for relatively sensitive conversations, and in practice, Signal remains the best choice for doing so. But there are a few real threat models where the options aren't Signal vs. SMS / Google Chat / Discord / etc., the options are Signal vs. nothing. For instance, you could be a journalist deciding whether to ask clarifying questions to a government whistleblower via Signal or meet up with them in a park. You could be an activist/demonstrator under a repressive regime deciding whether to coordinate some action this weekend via Signal or hold off on it entirely and tactically preserve your freedom. And so forth.
For those people, if (and to be clear this is a big "if," while this issue is one serious piece of evidence it is nonetheless inconclusive) Signal isn't trustworthy, it doesn't matter if Signal is the least-bad of the options.
(Also, it's not like Signal is the only e2e messenger around. There's iMessage/FaceTime, for instance. Churchill's claim was that the abstract idea of democracy was good, not that any concrete implementation like the British government was good.)
I don't think this is fair. Most of the solution to this is "not having them at all." That's not a good solution and still doesn't solve your problem since you can still be listened to.
> There's iMessage/FaceTime, for instance.
Which also has gotten in trouble recently with Pegasus as there was a 0-click exploit in iMessage. Honestly, that is a far more serious issue than the one here. That being said, I still trust iMessage and that the devs are doing the best that they can. I just recognize that security is difficult and will always be a cat and mouse game. There is no such thing as perfect security.
Take Reality Winner, for instance (the mechanics of that case were entirely unrelated to secure messengers, but it makes a relevant example overall). The effect on the world of her whistleblowing seems to have been minimal, and the cost to her was significant. Was it worthwhile? If she had been told the risks of the government identifying her were higher and decided not to leak anything, wouldn't that have been a better outcome?
I'm not saying there's perfect security. Vulnerable users absolutely need to be making risk assessments and deciding what they're comfortable with, and we should be clear nothing is risk-free. I'm just saying my sense of Signal's risk, in absolute terms, is higher than it was before I learned about this, and that matters to vulnerable users, not just the fact that it probably remains the lowest-risk messenger of the various options.
I agree with you overall, and the Pegasus exploit does reflect badly on Apple (and probably should reflect more badly on them than seems to be happening).
For the average person, I do not believe this is true. For the non-average person, I believe you are correct but most of these people are aware and should be constantly trained.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying that there are two different conversations to be had and we need to know which one we're having. To me it looks like Signal is about as good as you get without loads of complication and for what it is meant to do.
> he Pegasus exploit does reflect badly on Apple
And same with this on Signal. I do believe we should hold these companies to high standards. But the point I'm trying to make is that these also aren't reasons to abandon the platforms completely (as many users are suggesting here). That's throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
It's a little weird that Signal is both the "baseline security that everyone should have" product (a la HTTPS or WPA2) and the "you are literally hiding from the government" product. Of course, the target market for the latter, when you are not another government yourself, is by definition mostly illegal activity (whether or not the laws are justifiable), so it makes sense that there isn't a good product just for that.
In this particular case, it also complicates things that people who are literally hiding from the government also have normal ordinary conversations with lots of people, and it helps things for those ordinary conversations to happen on Signal, but this bug is particularly bad if you do that.
(I'm also not really sure where, say, people buying recreational drugs fit on the "average"/"non-average" axis. Is it a reasonable precaution to not text incriminating information to your drug dealer over Signal? It feels like it shouldn't be necessary, but I can see the argument for it.)
Apple suffered negative publicity from the 2014 iCloud photo leaks, even though those were "just" phishing and not a vulnerability/bug in the strict sense. Tim Cook had to give statements to the media, and in fact Apple stepped up its phishing protection by pushing two-factor authentication and notifying users about additional iCloud logins.