Can the NSA hack your Signal app?

Tucker Carlson wants you to know they can, and that's a "fact".

It's possible, pig--I might be bluffing--it's conceivable, you miserable vomitous mass, that I'm only lying here because I lack the strength to stand--then again, perhaps I have the strength after all.

Westley wasn’t able to humilliate Prince Humperdink because he could horribly disfigure him, but because the Prince believed that he could. As Sun Tzu wrote more than 2000 years ago, “All warfare is based on deception.”

Various state media soures have been informing us since the Wikileaks dump of CIA hacking secrets that US gestapo agencies are able to access encrypted Signal messages, perhaps most famously citing evidence from the Oath Keepers trial stemming from the January 6th psyop.

One could just do the math on 256-bit encryption to understand the incredible unliklihood of this being true, but as with most government press releases, the message has little to do with the veracity of the claim. CNBC tells us:

Forbes joins the fray:

The caption accompanying a photo of the Signal app tells us:

“The FBI appears to have a tool that can access Signal messages, even if a device is locked.”  

None of the releases ever explicitly state that state police forces have been able to decrypt the messages, in fact even the Forbes headline has a sliver of truth in it in. The deception lies in leading the 75% to believe that is how the messages were accessed with the headline is meant to blur the distinction between hacking a locked phone and decrypting Signal messages.

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Since it is important that these kinds of deceptions continue to trickle into the consciousness of the general publc, enter Tucker Carlson acting casual on the Full Send podcast. Earlier this week, he went into great detail recounting the time that he was hacked by the NSA and they did it by intercepting his Signal messages.

Tucker explains that he had secretly been working on trying to get an interview with Vladimir Putin and was informed by someone “who would know - trust me” that it wasn’t so secret anymore and exclaims “I [hadn’t] told anybody! Not my brother, not my wife - nobody!"

Nobody?!

It’s almost comedic how uncritically the hosts lap up his story. How much progress could he actually make on this grand plan of his without letting anyone in on the idea? Was he truly planning a seret scheme where he would he would make travel plans, buy a plane ticket, clandestinely enter Russia and pop by the Kremlin unannounced and the first person to find out he had been planning this all along would be Vlad’s secretary?

No, of course not, because the next thing Tucker recounts is that he had actually hadn’t “not told anyone” and in fact had messaged at least one person using signal about the idea. (video cued to the segment and is about 2 minutes long).

In case you missed it at the 40’ mark, one of the hosts makes sure that we get the real message, “You don’t even think about that … they can just go through your phone and find out everything.”

With Tucker confirming, “Well, they did it to me so I know that for a fact!”

DID YOU HEAR THAT? THE NSA CAN GO THROUGH YOUR PHONE ANYTIME THEY WANT TO. THEY EVEN DID IT TO TUCKER CARLSON!

Setting aside the fact that just because Tucker said that's what has happened does not mean it's a fact, it’s as clear a message from the corporate media as one can get and represents a step just a bit further than what had seen before. Although Tucker had made the claim that the NSA was spying on him back in June 2021, this was the first time he had specifically indicated that it was his Signal messages that were intercepted.

And thus through Tucker, we are explicitly told that the NSA can access your Signal messages, and thus by default, WhatsApp, Telegram and any other “secure” messaging app can be compromised.

Signal is often lumped in with these others, but there is one very significant difference. Signal is open source and while I don’t have the particular expertise to look at the code and discover if there are any loopholes, there are plenty of people who do and haven’t found any. Wired goes into a bit of detail on why that was the case in 2017, and has similar advice to mine.

That is from 2017, and certainly there’s the remote possibility that the government has a technology that far surpasses anything that is of public knowledge, but if they could really read our messages, they wouldn’t need to use deception to make us believe it.