Micah Lee: “Things are heating up. Millions of people are taking to the streets against Trump’s rising authoritarianism. Communities around the US are organizing to defend against ICE raids, to protest Israeli genocide, for mutual aid, and for other forms of fighting fascism. Signal can help people safely organize in all of these contexts. Signal groups, in particular, are more powerful than you might be aware of, even if you already use them all the time. In this post I’ll show you how to:

• Turn an in-person meeting into a Signal group using QR codes
• Manage large semi-public groups while still vetting new members
• Make announcement-only groups, perfect for volunteer networks rapidly responding to things like ICE raids..”
• Signal is encrypted. If police send data requests to Signal, they can’t hand over your conversations. But if police send data requests to your cell phone carrier, or Instagram, Bluesky, or your favorite Mastodon server, they can and likely will hand over your DMs. (If you use Twitter DMs not only will they share your messages with the police, Elon Musk might personally share them with neo-Nazis too.)
• Signal can’t access user metadata. It’s not just that Signal promises not to keep logs. They’ve literally engineered their service to cryptographically prevent themselves from having access to metadata, even if they wanted to. Signal doesn’t know what groups you’re in, or even what Signal groups exist on the platform. They don’t know the names or membership of any Signal group. They can’t even access your profile picture or name. All of this is stored on user devices and shared directly from user to user. On the other hand, if WhatsApp gets a data request, Meta will turn over details about everyone in your group, exactly who sends messages to who, and when, because WhatsApp collects all of this.
• Signal doesn’t share your phone number with other members of the groups you’re in (by default). This makes it considerably safer to join large activist groups where you don’t know or trust everyone involved, and where there might be an infiltrator. If you join a large WhatsApp group, anyone in that group will have everyone else’s phone number, and they can use that to learn far more about everyone’s identities.
• Signal is easy to use. It’s as easy as any of the commercial apps. Only unlike the commercial apps, Signal is free, open source, non-profit, and significantly more private. You just install the app, register an account, and you can start messaging privately, and join Signal groups, right away…”