

arrested several Oath Keepers for rioting at the Capitol on Jan. But it is no coincidence that criminals have also used this government-evading technology. For instance, Signal is used by journalists to communicate with confidential sources. This level of privacy can be beneficial on a number of fronts. Distrustful of government and large corporations and apparently persuaded that they are irredeemable, technologists look for workarounds. that is governed by a nonprofit - is founded on the belief that it needs to combat what it calls “state corporate surveillance” of our online activities in defense of an uncompromisable value: individual privacy.

It also allows users to set timers that automatically delete messages from the sender’s and receiver’s accounts. The company doesn’t know the identity of users, which users are talking to one another or who is in a group message. But unlike those other companies, Signal also refrains from collecting metadata about its users. Like Messages on your iPhone, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, Signal uses end-to-end encryption, making it impossible for the company to read the contents of user messages. To that end, he announced he would give $1 million a year to Signal, a text-messaging app. Dorsey is promoting one of the most potent and fashionable notions in Silicon Valley: that a technology free of corporate and government control is in the best interest of society. “It’s critical,” he said, “that the people have tools to resist this, and that those tools are ultimately owned by the people.”

Two weeks ago, the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey passionately advocated in a blog post the view that neither Twitter nor the government nor any other company should exert control over what participants post.
