The right to assemble and protest is enshrined in American law, but it can still be dangerous to hit the streets to make your voice heard. Your devices are a treasure trove of information about you, and you may not always know who’s collecting that data. Take a few minutes before you go to assess your digital and physical safety. Even if you have nothing to hide, you don’t want to accidentally give law enforcement officials any information you didn’t intend to share. Follow these tips to lock down your phone before a protest or other peaceful assembly.
Telegram isn’t encrypted, and honestly you shouldn’t use it.[1] Whatsapp and Signal are US-based, which means that they will give up your data on the first request.
Use actually secure messengers, like Delta Chat, SimpleX, or Matrix with end-to-end encryption.
I like fluffycat :3
edit: (its just matrix)
This is true. In regards to Signal, they do always comply with the governments request for data. The things is, Signal has next to no data on you. So when they comply, they give them everything they have (which is next to nothing). You can see everything they have given up here: https://signal.org/bigbrother/
Signal have published several times when they receive a request for data and their response.
Due to the mechanisms they employ, all they can actually give is if there’s an account associated with a phone number and the last time it logged in, if even that last bit. There’s some fairly detailed articles diving into how this works so well under the hood from a cryptographic standpoint, but it basically amounts to even addresses of users being able to be secret to minimize shared metadata to a bare minimum.
Also the software is entirely open-source – app and server both – and are frequently audited on this. The server never has an opportunity to receive any plain-text data to store.
The weak spot is always just having access to your device.
It’s a little clunky, but KryptEY is an on screen keyboard that can encode/decode messages. The encoded messages can be transmitted over any service.