Don’t use Briar.

Briar [0] gets funded by the OTF [1]. If you’re unfamiliar with the OTF, they’re publicly listed as a subsidiary of Radio Free Asia, a US state-run organization whose main goal (along with the other “Radio Free” incarnations such as Radio Free Europe, or Free Cuba Radio) is regime change for those Asian governments who don’t align with the US’s foreign policy interests.

The Radio Free agencies underwent a public re-branding in the early 1990s, but they are in effect the same CIA misinformation organizations from the 1950s:

Radio Free Asia began broadcasting to mainland China in 1951 from an elaborate set of transmitters in Manila. It was an arm of the Committee for Free Asia, and the C.I.A. thought of it as the beginning of an operation in the Far East that would rival Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.

It was only after Radio Free Asia’s transmitters were operating, according to sources familiar with the case, that the C.I.A. realized that there were almost no radio receivers in private hands in mainland China. An emergency plan was drawn up. Balloons, holding small radios tuned to Radio Free Asia’s frequency, were lofted toward the mainland from the island of Taiwan, where the Chinese Nationalists had fled after the Communist takeover of the mainland in 1949. The plan was abandoned when the balloons were blown back to Taiwan across the Formosa Strait.

What Allen Weinstein, one of the founders of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), another US “human rights” regime change org said of his organization applies equally to the Open Technology fund: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

The fund is designated to: “support open technologies and communities that increase free expression, circumvent censorship, and obstruct repressive surveillance as a way to promote human rights and open societies.”

One should question the commitment of a fund that dedicates itself to “obstructing surveillance”, while being created by a government who runs the most expansive surveillance system in world history. And how the US might define the terms “human rights”, and “open society” differently from those who know the US’s history in those areas.

[0] https://briarproject.org/

[1] https://www.opentech.fund/results/supported-projects/briar/

[2] https://dessalines.github.io/essays/why_not_signal.html#cia-funding

/s

Just a light jab, no harm intended.

All kidding aside, Briar is a great option, but so is Signal.

Signal enforces E2EE, is open source, has reproducible[3] builds (you can trust the app is what’s in public code), and best of all, because it is the gold standard of modern secure messaging apps, is under the scrutiny of many security experts. Finally, Signal has undergone various security audits [4] which they make public.

The reality of the situation is that if you’re a person of significant interest, someone with enough power can theoretically compromise you. The only way around it is to go completely open source hardware AND software, read every line of code, understand it, and compile everything yourself.

I will say, while I’m a Staunch supporter of Signal, Briar is what I’m keeping my eyes on for the future. It still needs to reach feature parity with most modern apps, and make it stupid easy to connect with people who are already in your contacts (I’m not going to ask my grandma to install Briar), but the tech behind it is pretty great [5] and only getting better.

[3] Only for Android.

[4] https://community.signalusers.org/t/wiki-overview-of-third-party-security-audits/13243

[5]