mcsweeneys.net
I’m the Private Messaging App Signal, and the Trump Administration Is Ruining My Brand
_“ The unofficial version of Signal used by Donald Trump’s former National Security Adviser Mike Waltz has been hacked.”_ — Reuters
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Want to hear something interesting? If you’re a messaging app trying to market yourself as the “gold standard of private communications," the last thing you want is to be in the news every day because some Fox News host is too dumb to understand how privacy works. That’s just a little free info from me, Signal, the messaging app you’ve probably been reading about lately thanks to a bunch of high-level government pinheads who think that the MMR vaccine is composed of fetus debris and gay powder.
These corrupt and over-coifed pillocks are ruining my brand. My whole thing is supposed to be privacy, which is my main selling point. Not that I sell anything—I don’t even have ads or collect meta data, which is why I’m superior to anything that the Meta dipshit produces. But you’d never know that now, would you, because these galumphing Trump admin clowns have absolutely obliterated my image with the kind of staggering incompetence you usually see only from mating giant pandas and Heinz Doofenshmirtz.
My creator actually goes by the name Moxie Marlinspike, I shit you not. That’s how seriously we take the principle of secrecy. Everyone who created, develops, or maintains me literally calls themselves “privacy advocates” on their LinkedIn page. But just like _Water-_ , _Gamer-_ and _Pizza-_ , I’m a fucking Gate now, which is the exact opposite of privacy. It’s like if, instead of hiding out in Cornish, New Hampshire, J. D. Salinger had started a livestream podcast about how to hit on teenage girls.
Before this scandal broke in March, the biggest story about me was on the 7.34.0 version rollout, which meant I could support Arm64 processors like Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus. Yeah, that was an actual news item you never read, because it wasn’t a war in Yemen. Now I’m in the news every day. Instead of thinking of me as “that excellent, discreet messaging alternative,” you’ll forever associate my name with the shadiest ineptocrats to ever work in DC. And this is the same city where Marion Barry smoked crack and Kissinger orchestrated a fascist coup in Chile.
The damage to my brand is incalculable. I used to be hugely popular among journalists working with anonymous sources. But what anonymous source is going to go anywhere near me now? If you were some high-up whistleblower, the last thing you’d do is message a journalist on an app strongly associated with JD Vance.
Do you even know what “E2EE” means? It’s end-to-end encryption, which is what I use, and it means that only the sender and recipient should be able to read your messages, and _not_ Jeffrey Goldberg. And here’s the biggest irony. I have an open-source design that allows anyone to inspect my code for vulnerabilities, which means I’m as transparent as I can possibly be. In other words, the exact opposite of this Cabinet, where lies are as popular as bootlicking, adultery, and Kid Rock.
Whenever I think I’m out of the news cycle and can finally separate myself from these blundering twonks, they keep pulling me back in. I didn’t even know I had a less secure knock-off version, and even worse, that it was hackable. Yet somehow Mike Waltz did, and here we are.
This whole thing has been disastrous. It’s almost as if my competitors cooked this scandal up, orchestrating a failure on such a colossal scale so that anyone considering me changed their minds, instead keeping their shitty, user-data stealing, ad-heavy, privacy-compromised apps. Wait a minute. Is this you, Mark? This has “Meta dipshit” written all over it. Screw you, asshole. You won’t get away with this. I mean, you probably will, because that’s the vibe nowadays.
I just hope that sometime in the future, when people talk about Signal, they’ll remember my cutting-edge technology, my Double Ratchet algorithm encryption, and my commitment to protecting user privacy.
But who am I kidding? They’ll probably just think of incompetence, arrogance, and .
