Signal is good as long as you are OK with traffic analysis, meaning that the government knows when you are and are not talking with other people, and likely from what location and what device. That’s potentially a lot of information for law enforcement but it comes with the territory of using a cellphone. Dessalines’ recommendation of Matrix and XMPP is not a good one, as they don’t have experienced cryptographers and the cryptographic protocol is not any better than Signal’s for this threat model. (XMPP’s best crypto is the Signal protocol, which is fine but doesn’t help against building of the social graph even though it’s not as centralized, due to traffic analysis, and the client is not well implemented. Matrix has historically been a mess and I personally trust the devs even less than Signal’s.) Briar is probably the best available but I haven’t reviewed it in depth. You can also do secure messaging over Tor or a mix network, which provides some privacy properties regarding the social graph, but stochastic correlation is still possible in this case, especially if the messaging service is not used that much, and the clients for this type of messaging are not well established. That’s why for a threat model that includes traffic analysis and a powerful state run counterrevolution, communication methods that don’t involve the internet or phone network at all are probably the best bet, although a lot of these methods are somewhat hampered by the surveillance state anyway. That said, infiltration by federal agents remains the bigger threat in a real Communist party, and which app you choose doesn’t help with that. Even Signal is fine if you have not structured your party to be resilient to infiltration.
Signal is good as long as you are OK with traffic analysis, meaning that the government knows when you are and are not talking with other people, and likely from what location and what device. That’s potentially a lot of information for law enforcement but it comes with the territory of using a cellphone. Dessalines’ recommendation of Matrix and XMPP is not a good one, as they don’t have experienced cryptographers and the cryptographic protocol is not any better than Signal’s for this threat model. (XMPP’s best crypto is the Signal protocol, which is fine but doesn’t help against building of the social graph even though it’s not as centralized, due to traffic analysis, and the client is not well implemented. Matrix has historically been a mess and I personally trust the devs even less than Signal’s.) Briar is probably the best available but I haven’t reviewed it in depth. You can also do secure messaging over Tor or a mix network, which provides some privacy properties regarding the social graph, but stochastic correlation is still possible in this case, especially if the messaging service is not used that much, and the clients for this type of messaging are not well established. That’s why for a threat model that includes traffic analysis and a powerful state run counterrevolution, communication methods that don’t involve the internet or phone network at all are probably the best bet, although a lot of these methods are somewhat hampered by the surveillance state anyway. That said, infiltration by federal agents remains the bigger threat in a real Communist party, and which app you choose doesn’t help with that. Even Signal is fine if you have not structured your party to be resilient to infiltration.