The Surveillance Architect Running Signal Engineering

18 hours ago
2

Sources: https://www.sambent.com/the-surveillance-architect-running-signal-engineering
Signal just rolled out centralized backups, and the guy who announced it has quite the resume. Jim O'Leary, Signal's VP of Engineering since 2019, spent the previous eight years building surveillance infrastructure at Twitter and Facebook.

At Twitter from 2011-2015, O'Leary built behavioral anomaly detection systems—essentially surveillance to track and flag "unusual" user activity. Perfect timing for the Arab Spring when governments desperately needed to track protesters. Then he went straight to Facebook during their worst privacy scandals from 2015-2019, managing security teams with multimillion-dollar budgets and running their "Privacy IMOCs"—the damage control teams that handled Cambridge Analytica, the Onavo VPN spying operation that Apple banned, and the $5 billion FTC fine.

This is the same guy who helped Facebook eliminate competition by absorbing WhatsApp and Instagram into their surveillance machine. When Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion, O'Leary was there ensuring they could properly surveil those 2 billion new users. He literally managed the fake privacy tool Onavo VPN that secretly spied on teenagers to track competing apps.

Now he's implementing Signal's new backup system that stores your entire message history on their servers, protected by a single key you're supposed to write down somewhere. No local backup option. Just centralized storage with paid tiers creating financial records through payment processors.
Signal knew their desktop encryption keys were stored in plaintext for six years and only fixed it after public outrage. Commercial forensics tools routinely decrypt Signal databases from seized devices. Yet instead of fixing these fundamental security issues, they're building centralized repositories of user communications under the guidance of Facebook's former surveillance architect.

The revolving door between surveillance capitalism and "privacy" organizations couldn't be more obvious.

☆-----☆-----☆-----☆-----☆ CHAPTERS ☆-----☆-----☆-----☆-----☆

00:00 Signal's New Centralized Backup Feature
01:21 Who The Hell Is Jim O'Leary?
05:08 Building Twitter's Behavioral Surveillance Systems
06:05 Managing Facebook During Cambridge Analytica
08:17 Running Facebook's Privacy Damage Control Teams
09:25 The Onavo VPN Spying Operation
11:29 Microsoft Health Vault and Medical Surveillance
13:29 The Pattern Across Jim's Career
17:02 Signal's Desktop Keys Stored in Plaintext for 6 Years
22:25 Commercial Forensics Already Crack Signal
26:51 The Backup Key Vulnerability
29:19 Payment Records Create Surveillance Trail
31:41 Metadata Correlation Attacks
33:46 Why No Local Backup Option?
35:54 Cross-Platform Restore Security Nightmare
38:38 Signal Complies With Every Court Order
40:17 Your Backups Become Evidence Archives
42:01 Operational Security Recommendations
43:32 Final Thoughts on Privacy Theater

#signal #privacy

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