For anyone who has read my last article, you know that the state is about to effectively clamp down on people who use encryption software. So, I figured a good series to start would be discussions of specific, high quality encryption software that I use, or that I can recommend using. This series will help you find out how to hide your communications easily, and usually for free. I’ll be going over text, email, files, and more, to help you get the best out of your communications, while not also being spied on every step of the way. This is the software the government hates, and is trying to label people terrorists and criminals for using, so in the spirit of the expansion of black and grey markets, let’s get started. This article specifically will be about five text communication applications which can help secure your life and make people like Trump hate you more.

Signal

Have you ever heard somebody in a movie or TV show, or something else, say that they can’t speak because the line is open or unsecured? Well, Signal is an app which employs end to end encryption in order to secure both text and voice on your phone. All you need is the app, a phone number and somebody else with the app ; As long as you are both using this app, nobody but the two or more of you will be able to access the contents of your conversations. It also has self-destructing messages, free international calling, and free SMS and MMS. It has no ads, and is fully supported by donations, grants, and other alternative forms of income, meaning if this stays this way, you’ll consistently be able to use this app for all your private communication needs.  But if you need more recommendations than some longhair posting on an anarchist website, you should know that not only does The Electronic Frontier Foundation support the use of the app, calling it basically perfect, but it came highly recommended by Snowden, and eventually became a staple of use by United States senators, which means that even people in official positions say that this is good software. Not that I care about that, but you might.

Wickr

Wickr. It’s very good. And there’s a reason I normally recommend it before I recommend Signal. The fact is, I know way too much about “open source” (OSINT) to be remotely comfortable just handing out my phone number to any random person because I don’t want the government to know what I’m saying. Even though Wickr doesn’t have voice calls as an option yet, I would much rather say everything over text using  a username that everybody already knows me by rather than give out a phone number that somebody could potentially trace back to an address, workplace, or other such sensitive location. This means that I normally don’t use Signal, even though it is, in fact, great. I use Wickr all the time, though. It has similar self-destructing messages, and similar chat capabilities, but I can simply tell people to look me up by my username (insanityisfree, if you’re interested). It also has a bunch of privacy features I appreciate deeply. Like telling you if somebody has taken a screenshot, locking messages, destroying any message remotely, and more.

One of the best shows on television, in my opinion, is Mr. Robot. Not only is it entertaining to normal people, because it has great writing, character development, and storytelling, but it specifically set out to be the most realistic hacking-related fiction available to date. One of the points of accuracy in the show was their use of Wickr, which is pretty well-known software, and it earns its reputation. Signal is not bad, but I’m  more likely to use something more anonymity-focused if I want that kind of thing in my life. “But I want to be known!” Well…

Keybase

Keybase is great. It does basically everything Wickr does, but it also has an interface which will be familiar to users of other popular chat services like Discord. Instead of being called servers, they’re called teams. And instead of having limited file stores, it seamlessly integrates with your native file system, and allows private Git repositories.

Additionally, it has key-enabled privacy. This means that you don’t have to worry about  any third parties  snooping on what you say. All you need to do is get a PGP key, which to be honest, is an entire article on its own. It has in-line PGP access, and even has a cryptocurrency wallet built in on the Stellar blockchain, for extremely fast payment. The app was designed for professional use for programmers who wanted privacy while working on potentially highly expensive projects, and it shows. It has all the privacy, and professional chat features you would need.

What’s more, is you can absolutely verify that somebody is who they say they are, because they can confirm their identity associated with a personal website, or many available social options. This means that you’re sure you’re finding somebody, and it reduces the likelihood of being scammed, or endangered, by impostors. Also, it lets you put in addresses for various other cryptocurrencies that aren’t Stellar, so that people who don’t have or want to have XLM don’t have to have it. But for some reason, this is too complicated for many people.

I found out about Keybase after being banned from Discord for exposing pedophiles. Yep. They fabricated a bunch of reasons that didn’t apply, and everybody who was in my server knew that none of these things were true. But for some reason, perhaps the persuasion of certain staff members, I was banned. I’m not going to get too much into that, but suffice it to say, when I needed a replacement, one of the first services I looked to was Keybase. I tried hard to find anybody saying that they were banned from there for unscrupulous reasons, and I couldn’t.

My guess as to the reason is that the encryption they use is so good, they can’t even read the messages. This would make it difficult to see the contents of the messages people send. So obviously I totally endorse the service. And they also recently got bots and webhooks. This could signal a shift to features more like Discord, which would be good, for obvious reasons. Especially considering who they appear to protect. However, I don’t know why, but many people have told me that they literally couldn’t get it to work. My guess is that they are simply not that technically inclined. So, for those people, a similar service exists, this may suit their interests.

Wire

Wire is also end to end encrypted, and it’s designed for businesses specifically. It has voice and video calling, along with a text chat feature, and they take security seriously. If you don’t mind being known for who you are, it’s a great way to stay private and secure. Plus, unlike the others I listed, this one also has web integration, and if you are willing to pay for the service,  also cloud integration, which means that you don’t actually have to have the software installed on your machine to use the service. This might be convenient for somebody who’s away from their machine but still needs to send, and receive, messages, privately.

Now, some people might be interested as to why I didn’t list Telegram for this reason. Well, suffice it to say, they have some issues with political dissidents, and have expressed that by banning Iranian protest channels, in the past. This was also covered by Snowden, who had previously supported the app, because of its alleged high-end security features, and commitment to privacy, and free expression.

That all ended when they started banning channels over political dissidents, so not only as a privacy advocate, and an advocate for some… uh… spicy things. But as a writer for a site partially devoted to the expansion of black and grey markets, I philosophically, ethically, and logically, can’t recommend an app which spies on its users,  and reports them to governments, or censors them. So, I can’t support Telegram as an app for privacy. There’s a possibility you could get away with saying what you wanted to say for a significant period of time, but the sword of Damocles would always be hanging over your head with regards to any speech you put on that platform. This is one of the reasons I haven’t started up a new Discord account after my previous one was banned. There is no reason to rejoin, and build everything back up, only to be banned for either untrue reasons, like I was last time. Or for ban evasion, so I just haven’t bothered yet and I might not ever bother.

That’s the reason I don’t really use with Telegram anymore. And it’s a shame, because they had the feature of Discord, where you can send out a link that people can join a server with from anywhere on the Internet.  I can’t philosophically support Telegram or Discord, And I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to evade censorship or have truly private messaging. All that brings me to my next and last suggestion.

Mesh

Mesh networks are fantastic. They don’t rely on normal Internet protocols, or the Internet at all, because what they’re designed to do is completely supplant the need for an Internet. They operate by local wireless signals, like Bluetooth, in order to  relay information between different devices connected to that network, without ever touching the Internet, unintentionally. So if you ever want to send messages during, say, a political protest, that you don’t want the government to see, or within a business, that you don’t want your boss to read, there is very little substitute for a mesh messaging network. Not only are they highly effective at delivering private messages, especially if you use one that offers encryption solutions, but there are lightweight. Almost anyone could put one of these on their device, without losing too much storage, or too much memory. I use an app called Bridgefy, but many exist.

All of these are more secure than any of the methods I’ve already spoken on, because there is no middleman, if you know what you’re doing. This means that you can speak freely, and as long as the person you’re speaking to is trustworthy, you can rest assured that your messages only got to them. It’s been used widely in protests all across the world, and used by many privacy and freedom advocates on the ground. Most notably, and most recently, it was used in the 2019 Hong Kong protests. A service called Wechat was heavily compromised by the Chinese government, and it resulted in a stemming of the information flow to outside sources. It meant that the brutality of the state could go unchecked, in the local area.

To circumvent this, they started sending the information over Bridgefy, which doesn’t rely on the highly censored app, nor does it rely on the heavily restricted Internet, controlled and manipulated by the Chinese government. Now, whether or not you approve of your government, the fact that this app can get around all governments makes it the best in the list. You just might have to meet some people in meatspace in order to use it. I’m sure you can manage. And if you do , you’ll be much safer than the vast majority of people, relying on standard tech in order to say things which might later be used against them.

But remember, using this tech puts a big target on your forehead. Trump, and his highly restrictive administration, don’t like dissidence. They don’t like people speaking out against them, and they certainly don’t like not being able to see what people are saying, to know whether or not they are speaking out against them. Most importantly, they don’t like poor people being able to do this.

As I stated in my last article, the document they circulated to discuss this was primarily upset at the fact that this software was so commonplace now. They are upset that what was previously only available to those with big businesses, and bigger wallets, had become available to the masses.

It’s time for some bad news for  any of you who thought my article on encryption being at risk was paranoid or to those who thought they’d never try for encryption control, since the state was rhetorically linking the use of encryption software to acts of terrorism.

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Imagine an Internet where the law required every message sent to be read by government-approved scanning software. Companies that handle such messages wouldn’t be allowed to securely encrypt them, or they’d lose legal protections that allow them to operate.

Yep. Let me take this part of the article to tell you that if you plan to get this software, get it while you can.. It continues:

That’s what the Senate Judiciary Committee has proposed and hopes to pass into law. The so-called EARN IT bill, sponsored by Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), will strip Section 230 protections away from any website that doesn’t follow a list of “best practices,” meaning those sites can be sued into bankruptcy. The “best practices” list will be created by a government commission, headed by Attorney General Barr, who has made it very clear he would like to ban encryption, and guarantee law enforcement “legal access” to any digital message…

–

You can’t have an Internet where messages are screened en masse, and also have end-to-end encryption any more than you can create backdoors that can only be used by the good guys. The two are mutually exclusive. Concepts like “client-side scanning” aren’t a clever route around this; such scanning is just another way to break end-to-end encryption. Either the message remains private to everyone but its recipients, or it’s available to others.

Governments Plan to Monitor Every Online Message

There you have it – they want to destroy the privacy of your messages, and why? Well because for many years, they’ve aligned encryptors with terrorists… and now, they’re aligning those of us using it to pedophiles. That’s right – the bill is alleged to block distribution of child sexual abuse material. The problem with the bill? Other than being a grotesque infringement on the fourth and fifth amendment, and the death knell of privacy, it’s also completely unnecessary.

To prove that, here are some pointers from Riana Pfefferkorn, the Associate Director of Surveillance and Cybersecurity at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.

She rightly points out in an article for Stanford Cyber Law that government can already hold providers accountable for CSAM. She wonders why they don’t just amend this law to give them more duties, rather than effectively abolishing it. She wonders why a conflict with existing legislation, Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994 wasn’t addressed in the bill. She basically says only criminals follow laws, and that good faith actors might be scared into significantly altering their platforms. She says this will lead to a bleed of users to “the bad sites” to avoid censors, and that ultimately it won’t stop people who want to post it badly enough on the “good” ones. Seriously, look over her analysis – it’s very good.

Earn It Act How to Ban End to End Encryption without Actually Banning It

But let’s be clear – I hate pedos, and my solution for them is usually pretty “metal” – I was banned from Discord for forming a small group of people to do what these legislators want government money to do. I didn’t need a taxpayer salary to do it, either. The agorist solution is already possible, and heavily interfered with. That solution is community self-policing. Same with all other crimes too. But as usual, the government just wants to make it worse – to keep us in line, and force us to think we need them when we don’t.

So, don’t be surprised if this tech becomes rare in the future. It’s just like any other form of prohibition, in that the moment that they start criminalizing the common users of a thing, it’s not too many steps down the road to outright banning it. So, get it while you can and stay tuned to the Agorist Nexus, for more updates on how to secure your life, and evade the watchful eye of the panopticon. And do it soon, because even though you don’t have much freedom as it stands, you might have even less in the future, and information like this might be scarce. So be sure just stock up on your APK files, and whatever else you need to constantly download all these applications, in case they become somehow less visible. You never know when you need it, and it’s better to have it and not need it, then need it and not have it. Consider it part of your prep to secure your communications.

Loose lips sink ships. Keep your boat upright.

I wish you smooth sailing.