this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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This article is ahistoric and unnecessarily conspirational.
Signal and its predecessors like TextSecure have been run by different companies/organizations:
Open Whisper Systems received about 3M USD total from the US government via the Open Technology Fund for the purpose of technology development … during 2013 to 2016. Source: archive of the OTF website: https://web.archive.org/web/20221015073552/https://www.opentech.fund/results/supported-projects/open-whisper-systems/
The Signal Foundation (founded 2018) was started by an 105M USD interest free loan from Brian Acton, known for co-founding WhatsApp and selling it to Facebook (now Meta).
So important key insights:
Thank you for sharing this!
One question: how can the loan from Brian Acton be interest free? I thought the federal government imposed minimum interest rates to prevent people from bypassing tax-free gifting limits.
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The article doesn't say that Signal Foundation did, it says Signal did... which is well-documented in OTF's annual reports among other places.
I agree that this article has lots of other problems, though; I describe more in my comment about it in another thread.