This woman is definitely a spook. I had a previous post where I concluded she was a spook, but in this interview, she just awkwardly laughs after giving good responses even if not fully accurate. And when talking about the phone and text message hack by supposedly Chinese hackers, she wasn’t exactly being honest, as it’s not really a backdoor but the telephone network just not being secure. And while mentioning Washington DC, she nonchalantly mentioned a meeting with an asset being exposed, which is something a spook would reference. And the government pushing and using Signal, this woman, I wouldn’t trust using it. And it always bothered me they identified you by phone number (I think now they allow a username or will soon).
If we follow the trail of Signal being a front, we’d have to look at co-founder Brian Acton made rich by co-founding WhatsApp and selling it to Facebook, a spook big tech company with a link through Peter Thiel to the CIA venture capitalist firm, In-Q-Tel. And the other co-founder is even spookier, Moxie Marlinspike, with Wikipedia page listed below Brian Acton’s Wikipedia page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Acton
Brian Acton
Brian Acton (born February 17, 1972) is an American business executive and computer programmer serving as the executive chairperson of Signal Technology Foundation, which he co-founded with Moxie Marlinspike in 2018.[1][2] Acton also serves as interim chief executive officer (CEO) of Signal Messenger LLC.[3]
He was formerly employed at Yahoo!. In 2009, Jan Koum and Acton co-founded WhatsApp,[4] a mobile messaging application which was acquired by Facebook in February 2014 for US$19 billion. Acton left WhatsApp in September 2017, to start the Signal Foundation.[5] According to Forbes in 2020, Acton was the 836th-richest person in the world, with a net worth of $2.5 billion.[4]
Early life and education
Acton grew up in Michigan,[6] later moving to Central Florida, where he graduated from Lake Howell High School.[7] Acton received a full scholarship to study engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, but he left after one year to study at Stanford.[7] In 1994, he graduated from Stanford University with a degree in computer science.[8]
Career
In 1992, Acton became a systems administrator for Rockwell International, before becoming a product tester at Apple Inc. and Adobe Systems. In 1996, he joined Yahoo Inc.[9]
Yahoo!
Two years after Acton joined Yahoo, Jan Koum was hired as an infrastructure engineer shortly after he met Acton while working at Ernst & Young as a security tester.[10] Over the next nine years, the two worked together at Yahoo. Acton lost millions in the dot-com bubble of 2000.[11] In September 2007, Koum and Acton left Yahoo! and took a year off, traveling around South America. They both tried to get jobs at Facebook, but weren’t hired.[12]
Main article: WhatsApp
In January 2009, Koum bought an iPhone and believed the App Store was about to spawn a whole new industry of apps. He talked to his friend, Alex Fishman, about developing an app.[10] Koum chose the name WhatsApp because it sounded like “what’s up”, and a week later on his birthday, February 24, 2009, he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California.[10]
In 2014, Koum and Acton sold WhatsApp to Facebook for approximately US$19 billion in cash and stock.[8] Forbes estimated that Acton held over 20% stake in the company, making his net worth around $3.8 billion.[13][14]
In 2016, Acton led a funding round for Trak N Tell and raised $3.5 million along with two other investors.[15][16]
In September 2017, Acton left WhatsApp.[17][14] Acton told Forbes that he left over a dispute with Facebook regarding monetization of WhatsApp, and voluntarily left $850 million in unvested options by leaving a few months before vesting was completed.[18][19] He also said that he was coached by Facebook executives to mislead European regulators regarding Facebook’s intention to merge Facebook and WhatsApp user data.[20]
Signal
When he left WhatsApp in September 2017, Acton started the Signal Foundation, which is dedicated to helping people have access to private communication through an encrypted messaging app.[21][22] Signal is widely used by journalists and human rights activists.[23]
In February 2018, it was announced that Acton was investing $50 million into Signal.[9] This funding was a loan from Acton to the new non-profit Signal Technology Foundation, created in 2018.[24] By the end of 2018, the loan had increased to $105,000,400, due to be repaid on February 28, 2068. The loan is unsecured and carries nil interest.[25]
On March 20, 2018, Forbes reported that Acton had publicly tweeted support for the #DeleteFacebook movement, in a “new level of public backlash”.[26] In November 2019, Acton explained to journalist, Steven Levy, that he decided it was time to make his feelings public because there was pressure unfolding against Facebook.[27]
Other activities
Philanthropy
In 2014, Acton and his wife Tegan started the foundation Wildcard Giving, with three sister foundations: Sunlight Giving, Acton Family Giving, and Solidarity Giving.[28][29][30][31] Sunlight Giving is a family foundation supporting the basic services of low-income families with young children age five and below living in the San Francisco Bay Area.[32][33] It also provides support for safe spaces and organizations working for food security, housing stability, and healthcare access. Sunlight Giving has $470 million in assets. It granted $6.4 million in 2015, $19.2 million in 2016, and $23.6 million in 2017.[32] This private foundation helped to fund Magnify Community, a non-profit organization with the goal of redirecting philanthropists’ givings to nonprofits.[34]
In 2019, Forbes reported that Brian Acton and his wife had given more than $1 billion to charitable causes over their lifetimes.[35]
Personal life
He is married to Tegan Acton and resides in Palo Alto, California.[36]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moxie_Marlinspike
Moxie Marlinspike
Moxie Marlinspike is the pseudonym of an American entrepreneur, cryptographer, and computer security researcher.[1][2] Marlinspike is the creator of Signal, co-founder of the Signal Technology Foundation, and served as the first CEO of Signal Messenger LLC. He is also a co-author of the Signal Protocol encryption used by Signal, WhatsApp,[3] Google Messages,[4] Facebook Messenger,[5] and Skype.[6]
Marlinspike is a former head of the security team at Twitter[7] and the author of a proposed SSL authentication system replacement called Convergence.[8] He previously maintained a cloud-based WPA cracking service[9] and a targeted anonymity service called GoogleSharing.[10]
Career
Marlinspike began his career working for several technology companies, including enterprise infrastructure software maker BEA Systems Inc.[3][11]
In 2010, Marlinspike was the chief technology officer and co-founder of Whisper Systems,[12] an enterprise mobile security startup company. In May 2010, Whisper Systems launched TextSecure and RedPhone. These were applications that provided end-to-end encrypted SMS messaging and voice calling, respectively. Twitter acquired the company for an undisclosed amount in late 2011.[13] The acquisition was done “primarily so that Mr. Marlinspike could help the then-startup improve its security”.[11] During his time as Twitter’s head of cybersecurity,[14] the firm made Whisper Systems’ apps open source.[15][16]
Marlinspike left Twitter in early 2013 and founded Open Whisper Systems as a collaborative open source project for the continued development of TextSecure and RedPhone.[17][18][19] At the time, Marlinspike and Trevor Perrin started developing the Signal Protocol, an early version of which was first introduced in the TextSecure app in February 2014.[20] In November 2015, Open Whisper Systems unified the TextSecure and RedPhone applications as Signal.[21] Between 2014 and 2016, Marlinspike worked with WhatsApp, Facebook, and Google to integrate the Signal Protocol into their messaging services.[22][23][24]
In 2017, Marlinspike assisted the cryptocurrency company MobileCoin as an early technical advisors alongside fellow former DARPA researcher Todd Huffman.[25][26][27][28][29] MobileCoin was designed to be the in-app payments for Signal and Mixin Messenger.[30]
On February 21, 2018, Marlinspike and WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton announced the formation of the Signal Technology Foundation and its subsidiary, Signal Messenger LLC.[31][1] Marlinspike served as Signal Messenger’s first CEO until stepping down on January 10, 2022.[32] In the wake of the United States government group chat leak Marlinspike posted in March 2025 “There are so many great reasons to be on Signal. Now including the opportunity for the Vice President of the USA to randomly add you to a group chat for coordinating sensitive military operations. Dont sleep on this opportunity.”[33]
Research
SSL stripping
In a 2009 paper, Marlinspike introduced the concept of SSL stripping, a man-in-the-middle attack in which a network attacker could prevent a web browser from upgrading to an SSL connection in a way that would likely go unnoticed by a user. He also announced the release of a tool, sslstrip, that would automatically perform these types of man-in-the-middle attacks.[34][35] The HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) specification was subsequently developed to combat these attacks.[36]
SSL implementation attacks
Marlinspike has discovered a number of different vulnerabilities in popular SSL implementations. Notably, he published a 2002 paper on exploiting SSL/TLS implementations that did not correctly verify the X.509 v3 “BasicConstraints” extension in public key certificate chains. This allowed anyone with a valid CA-signed certificate for any domain name to create what appeared to be valid CA-signed certificates for any other domain. The vulnerable SSL/TLS implementations included the Microsoft CryptoAPI, making Internet Explorer and all other Windows software that relied on SSL/TLS connections vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack. In 2011, the same vulnerability was discovered to have remained in the SSL/TLS implementation on Apple Inc.‘s iOS.[37][38] Also notably, Marlinspike presented a 2009 paper in which he introduced the concept of a null-prefix attack on SSL certificates. He revealed that all major SSL implementations failed to properly verify the Common Name value of a certificate, so that they could be tricked into accepting forged certificates by embedding null characters into the CN field.[39][40]
Solutions to the CA problem
In 2011, Marlinspike presented a talk, “SSL And The Future Of Authenticity”,[41] at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. He outlined many of the problems with certificate authorities and announced the release of a software project called Convergence to replace them.[42][43] In 2012, Marlinspike and Perrin submitted an Internet Draft for TACK,[44] which is designed to provide SSL certificate pinning and help solve the CA problem, to the Internet Engineering Task Force.[45]
Cracking MS-CHAPv2
In 2012, Marlinspike and David Hulton presented research that makes it possible to reduce the security of MS-CHAPv2 handshakes to a single DES encryption. Hulton built hardware capable of cracking the remaining DES encryption in less than 24 hours, and the two made the hardware available for anyone to use as an Internet service.[46]
Mobily surveillance controversy
In 2013, Marlinspike published emails on his blog that he claimed were from Saudi Arabian telecom service Mobily soliciting his help in surveilling their customers, including intercepting communications running through various applications. Marlinspike refused to help, making the emails public instead. Mobily denied the allegations. “We never communicate with hackers”, the company said.[47]
Traveling
Marlinspike says that when flying within the United States he is unable to print his own boarding pass, is required to have airline ticketing agents make a phone call in order to issue one, and is subjected to secondary screening at TSA security checkpoints.[48]
While entering the U.S. on a flight from the Dominican Republic in 2010, Marlinspike was detained by federal agents for nearly five hours, all his electronic devices were confiscated, and at first agents claimed he would only get them back if he provided his passwords so they could decrypt the data. Marlinspike refused to do this, and the devices were eventually returned, though he noted that he could no longer trust them, saying, “They could have modified the hardware or installed new keyboard firmware.”[49]
Recognition
- In 2016, Fortune magazine named Marlinspike among its 40 under 40 for being the founder of Open Whisper Systems and “[encrypting] the communications of more than a billion people worldwide”.[50] Wired also named him to its “Next List 2016,” as one of “25 Geniuses Who Are Creating the Future of Business.”[51]
- In 2017, Marlinspike and Perrin were awarded the Levchin Prize for Real World Cryptography “for the development and wide deployment of the Signal protocol”.[52][53]
Personal life
Originally from the state of Georgia,[3] Marlinspike moved to San Francisco in the late 1990s at age 18.[1][11] The name Moxie Marlinspike is an assumed name partly derived from a childhood nickname.[1][3]
Marlinspike is a sailing enthusiast and master mariner.[3][54] In 2004, he bought a derelict sailboat and, with three friends, refurbished it and sailed around the Bahamas while making a “video zine” about their journey called Hold Fast.[1][3][11] He is also an anarchist,[3] and several of his essays and speeches are published on the website The Anarchist Library, including “An Anarchist Critique of Democracy”[55] and “The Promise of Defeat.”[56]