I'm Jared. And I'm Mike.
And this is posting through it Bulletin.
We're trying something new here. This is going to be a shorter
episode focused on giving you the information that will
hopefully help guide you as the weather warms up and we enter
into protest season. A lot of crazy shit in this
country right now. And I think people are going to
be active. The Trump administration's given
us no sign of backing down from its authoritarian push across
the US, which all but guarantees that we're going to see more
conflicts in the streets with Trump's paramilitary forces.
It's almost inevitable. And we've seen in Minneapolis
and other places as well. You know what they did to Renee
Goode, what they did to Alex Petty?
These people are capable of killing.
But they've also expressed a desire to stamp out anti fascist
activism, which can theoretically include anything
that opposes their autocratic vision for the country.
That puts a greater scrutiny on communication between organizers
and protesters, which is what this episode's going to focus
on. As tensions grew in Minneapolis
and protesters, community organizers, activists responded
to the administration's violent I'll fated operation Metro surge
influencers claim to have quote UN quote, infiltrated Signal
chats used by people on the ground there by joining these
groups where links were publicly shared and then posting
screenshots, screen recordings and all kinds of outlandish
commentary about what those chats contained.
Right, Jared? And it's important to note that
these anti antifa Internet performers who are essentially
interchangeable and wait, if you're listening to this in
future, there may be new ones I haven't even heard of yet.
They are not particularly gifted sleuths generally.
They have a tendency to lie and self aggrandize.
They aren't journalists. What they do is designed to
serve themselves financially and to please authority, IE they
don't speak truth to power, they distort tattle, and they flatter
powerful men. They are in no uncertain terms
and in a literal sense, professional bootlickers.
One of these guys is a big chunkist named Cam Higbee.
We have covered this guy on PCI before.
Higbee claimed to infiltrate so-called antifa networks on
Signal. Influencers like this call
protest protesters terrorists. That's the way they describe
people who are law abiding protesters and they steal that
language from the Trump administration itself.
He unveiled his findings about the Minneapolis protests in
January 2026 on Benny Johnson's show.
Benny Johnson, another influencer, said this is clearly
a coordinated infrastructure and we'd like for the feds to take a
crack at trying to get rid of this infrastructure.
The way they approach the mob or cartels or other terrorist
networks, right By the way, the mob.
OK, this is the anti ICE protest.
There's no credible evidence of technical hacking or covert
access beyond simply joining these chats like any other user
could. There's no reason to think Kim
Higbee pulled off some sort of technical feat that allowed him
to get into it. The law enforcement is now
looking at both the communication practices and the
public claims these influencers are making.
FBI Director and frequent PTI punchline Akash Patel announced
on the same podcast hosted by Benny Johnson that after seeing
Kim Higbee's post about the Signal chats in Minneapolis, he
asked the FBI to open up an investigation.
We immediately opened up that investigation because that sort
of Signal chat being coordinated with individuals, not just
locally in Minnesota, but maybe even around the country.
If that leads to a break in the federal statute or a violation
of some law, then we are going to arrest people.
You cannot create a scenario that illegally entraps and puts
law enforcement in harm's way. So understandably this has made
a lot of people nervous. A lot of people have questions
about Signal. There's some bad information,
some bad advice going around. So on this one, we've got Bill
Buddington with us. He's going to talk through how
to use Signal effectively during a protest and in a way that
doesn't put you in danger. We want everyone to stay safe
here. Say from a blamely corrupt
regime that equates their dissent, their dissatisfaction,
their outrage, their anger with terrorism.
Say from far right influencers who would not hesitate to ruin
your life if it meant content they could profit from.
And I thought it'd also just be helpful to give you some general
background about what signal is and how it works exactly.
Bill, thanks for taking some time to join us today.
A lot of people have, you know, I've certainly seen a lot of
people getting a little antsy about Signal, maybe not fully
understanding it. And I appreciate you taking the
time to sit down with us and kind of explain to us what it
is, how it works, and if people are considering participating in
a protest or doing some kind of activism, what they need to
know. So first I just want to start
off, what can you tell us about Signal and its origins?
Yeah. So Signal came into being as
kind of a combination of two apps that preceded it and they
were developed between 2010 and 2015.
The one app was tech secure and that was text messaging,
encrypted text messaging. And then there was also Red
Phone that was encrypted calls and they merged to form Signal
because all that is incorporated in Signal and that that merger
happened in around 2015. So yeah, that that's kind of,
you know, was developed by Moxie Marlinspike originally.
Yeah, just kind of was handed over to its own nonprofit in 20,
I want to say like 20-17 around then.
So when you say encrypted, maybe this is really basic, but just
to break it down for people so they understand what that
actually means. When you say text messages or
phone calls are encrypted, what's actually going on there?
What encryption means in the most basic general form is that
a message or some communication is being a scrambled up and the
only way to unscramble it is to have some secret key that you're
able to unscramble it with basic encryption.
So if you go to a website like, you know, googleoreff.org,
you're going to go to that website over what's called HTTPS
and HTTPS that S stands for secure.
That's accessing the website over protocol that allows you to
communicate with it in a way that your say, coffee shop
hacker isn't able to actually intercept and see that traffic.
So they can't read your messages or read your communications or
be able to look at what's going on or, or impersonate you with
your communication to that website, right?
So that's basic encryption that's widely deployed
everywhere by this point. Now there's a more advanced form
of encryption called end to end encryption.
An end to end encryption is so that you are communicating with
your friend and you know, it's not so much about the service
that that a hacker, for instance, can impersonate.
But with end to end encryption, you're able to, to ensure that
you know, your communications aren't being able to be seen by
the service itself and, and not being able to be impersonated by
that service as well. So so there are guarantees that
end to end encryption really provides above and beyond basic
encryption. So I make sure I understand it.
Basically if you're in Signal, you write a message when it goes
out of the app, it kind of scrambles it up and then when it
gets to the person that you're sending it to, it unscrambles it
and shows it to them. Is that does that sound right?
Yeah. And it's using public key
cryptography, which is this advanced way of ensuring that
there are keys that are generated on your device that
allow that communication to happen.
And those are stored on the device itself that you're
holding in your hand and not on the signal servers for instance.
Anyone can download, you know, if you have a smartphone, you
can download it right from whatever App Store.
Protesters are using this in Minneapolis as we discussed in
the intro. Is this still the most effective
way to organize during a protest?
Do you believe that signal is the most effective way to
organize I guess And is that what you would recommend vis A
vis other products? Yeah.
So Signal is kind of widely considered by security experts
and information security field in general to be the gold
standard in end to end encryption and in communication
security in general. And it's something that I see as
spring up personally as being the most secure option,
especially for for audiences, audiences that that have access
to it. Now, when you're in a protest
situation, there could be, and there have been situations where
they cut off all Internet access to a specific area.
We haven't seen this recently, but this was part of, you know,
the Bart protests and and in San Francisco.
And so if that happens, then you might not have access to signal
at that particular time. So it's important to point that
out as a caveat and there might be other kind of more local
options available. So that's something they have
the, the government would have the capacity to do to people to
in order to eliminate the, the advantages you might get from
being able to use that in a protest.
How does it prevent outside surveillance?
Better necessarily than Telegram, Discord or WhatsApp?
Those are the three that come to mind.
But there are, I mean there are others that are out there.
WhatsApp employs the Signal protocol, so it's able to
scramble messages and send them and, you know, unscramble in the
same way as Signal is. But in terms of the emphasis,
they prioritize usability over the encryption and safety.
And that means, for instance, that they'll make certain
choices like, you know, not having your backups for your
chats encrypted by default. And that will completely
circumvent the protection that you get from an app like Signal.
So Signal, you're going to have all of your defaults, all of
your settings as secure as possible right out-of-the-box.
And WhatsApp, you know it can do that, but it's not going to have
those settings enabled and locked down just as you're
downloading it. There's going to be a lot of
ways in which the you can trip over the settings and not have
your communications secure. So when it came to Minneapolis,
one of the concerns about Signal I saw come out of that came
after Alex Pretty was killed. About an hour later, this guy
named Cam Higbee started posting a screen, recording videos,
scrolling through different Signal chats, showing who's in
there. You saw all kinds of people jump
in on it, trying to make amateur identifications of who might be
in it, that sort of thing. So one of the things that people
that we saw were talking about that we wanted to, you know, try
to make an episode to help people understand the reality
about is the idea of infiltration.
There's different kinds of signal group chat links you can
send. There's, you know, publicly
shared links, privately shared links.
But when it comes to infiltration or, or, or this
idea that maybe the police might join your signal chat or one of
these influencers who seeks to get the police to crack down on
you joins into it or a counter organizer, I mean, whoever it
may be. How real is that risk?
Does it have anything to do with the app itself or sort of how
it's used? Or help me understand that?
This is a situation where you're adding someone to a chat and
they can be someone who you're not intending to, to actually
add to the chat, right? You need to make sure that
you're vetting that person. And, and as the National
Security Advisor Mike Waltz found out when he mistakenly
added chief editor of The Atlantic to a group chat, you
know, you need to to make sure that the you're actually adding
the people that you expect to be adding, right?
So it's important to kind of do that vetting and because
otherwise you can have that situation where your messages
are inadvertently leaked and posted all over the Atlantic's
website for the case of, you know, the current
administration. Yeah.
And and also I think it's important to point out that we
want to have people actually using the official Signal app
because, you know, they're not. The other aspect of that story
is that there was this third party app that the
administration was using and that app was also kind of
storing all their backups onto a third party server.
So something that you really want to make sure that you're
using official software and not some kind of, you know, clone of
the official software. This, There may not be a correct
answer to this, but let's say Minneapolis is happening in your
neighborhood. And I don't just mean the cold.
You want to organize a kind of a large group of people very
quickly. Is there really anything you can
do about that other than a public facing link to kind of
just get people to, you know, on the same page?
I mean, other than perhaps spelling out some rules of
engagement and just to make people realize that like, hey,
what you post on here could create problems for you.
This is a public facing link. I mean, is there anything else
that we, you know, they can do to avoid, you know, falling into
the hands of of these, you know, far right agitators or the FBI?
You know, what can you do when you need to organize a group of
people in a neighborhood fairly quickly?
I mean, I to me it doesn't seem like there's an easy answer.
Yeah, I think that there isn't this inherent problem with your
trying to publicize an event and make people aware of it, but yet
you're trying to keep out those that might be trying to disrupt
it or to, you know, have a negative influence on what
you're trying to do. And so I, I, I don't think that
there is a technological solution that's that's more of
like a social problem and and social problems don't have
technical solutions, right? They have they have social
solutions that that kind of is kind of inherent with the the
way that you're trying to organize that.
That's not what our AI overlords have been telling me, but I'll
take your word for it, Bill. But it seems to, yeah, it seems
to me, I mean, this is just just a hypothesis from me and I'm not
an expert. I'm just one of the hosts of
posting through it. But it seems to me that that
perhaps people should make distinctions publicly, you know,
make distinctions, Hey, this is a public facing group.
And just be very clear about that and just say there are
certain risks involved with that.
Private groups can break off into, you know, their thing that
are that are carefully vetted and public facing, you know,
public facing groups just to make rules.
And wherever you're posting it, be it blue sky or X, God forbid,
or wherever else, just to say like, Hey, just be be a little
careful about this this one. You know this is potentially
that, but instructions will be given here.
Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, yeah, giving those
caveats to a public facing group, I think that, yeah,
people tend to think that, oh, this is signal, so this is
secure and it is in one sense. It's technically secure, but
it's not socially secure. It's going to be posted to
everyone that was added to that group, right.
If you say something in a group that has member of law
enforcement in it, then that message is going to be delivered
to that person. You don't necessarily not
necessarily going to be divulge your identity.
Your identity might be kept secret, but that message and the
fact that someone posted, you know, a message in that group
saying let's do criminal activity X will will be let out.
And at that point, you know, so it's, so it's important to make
sure that you know the parameters of a group that
you're being added to. So if it's a group that has all
of its members well vetted for, then that's a very different
situation then hey, I just got added to a group of 600 people
that are going to post updates on where they supposedly saw
ICE. Speaking of law enforcement,
this is another question that sort of sticks out with me that
it could be useful to get some clarity on the message is, you
know, you've explained our end to end encrypted, right?
So the likelihood that they set up an antenna and yank it out,
you know, the, the way they might standard text message or
or a phone call or something may be more limited.
But what kind of ways could law enforcement access signal chat
records? Because the bleak of the chat
groups in Minneapolis that I mentioned earlier, Kosh Patel,
the director of the FBI, went on a podcast a couple days later
and was like, I saw those tweets and we're opening an
investigation. I guess I'm curious, just how
much, how much risk are the people in those group chats
actually facing from the FBI at this point?
Like like what can they do? There's a number of ways, and
I'm just going to take the first part of that question, a number
of ways in which your chats can be divulged even if Signal
itself isn't compromised. And one of those instances is
having a piece of spy Ware that has targeted you being installed
on your device, right? So we know of some of these.
Pieces of spyware like Pegasus and other, you know, kind of of
the state, state sponsored malware attacks and they have
specifically targeted human rights defenders, political
opponents, I would say the Pina Nieto regime in Mexico.
There's been Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist that was that was
targeted. And by and large, these are
extremely targeted attacks. And they're not deploying this
to a wide swath of society. Why?
Well, they would love to, but they know that once they start
mass deploying these vulnerabilities that they get
into, that they use to get into people's devices, that there's
some traces, some indicators that that's happened.
And right now, the developers of those pieces of a spy Ware are
in kind of a cat and mouse game with the Apples and Googles of
the world. And that's why when your phone
says you have a security update, it's important to install that
security update because it's going to patch some of those
vulnerabilities that the NSO group uses, for instance, to
bundle into Pegasus malware and compromise your device.
And likewise, you know, spyware on the one hand is, is something
that's, you know, going to to be a way in which someone's device
gets compromised by a remote hacker, you know, just just by
merit of it being on the Internet.
But there's this other side of it.
If your device is seized, if you're arrested and your device
is taken away from you, then they can take that device and
plug it into a forensic imaging piece of hardware.
You know, the two main vendors of this are magnet forensics
that that produces a piece of hardware called the grey key.
And another vendor is Celebrite who produces a piece of hardware
called the universal forensic extraction device.
And once a cop or whatever plugs your device into one of these
forensic imagers, it'll try different combinations of your
pass of pass phrases just to get into that device.
And then once it's able to crack your device passphrase, then all
bets are off. It can take a whole image of
your disk. It can see the messages that
you've sent. It can see your images and
videos, medical data that's stored on the device, crypto
keys for your Bitcoin or sounds. Bad.
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, that's one of the
reasons why it's important to to kind of practice data
minimalization, that if you are afraid of your, what your phone
actually holds being divulged, then don't bring it to that
protest. Don't bring it into a situation
where you're at risk of getting detained because it could fall
into the wrong hands and have all that data extracted from it.
A follow up again thinking about the leak of Signal chats in
Minneapolis and what happened there.
Let let's assume and I don't know if this is true or not,
that nobody in these Signal chats they have custody of and
made a cop, you know, we're able to crack into a phone and take a
a copy of the disk. They just have, you know, video
of recordings of screenshots inside the Signal app.
You've got usernames, user profile pictures, copies of the
messages. Is there a way the FBI can
figure out who is in these chats?
Like can they subpoena Signal or or will the company give up
those records? So what the FBI or federal law
enforcement or even local law enforcement can do is they can
use traditional police work and, you know, they have a, you know,
leaked document or just a, you know, a copy of someone's signal
username. Then, you know, they might ask
or just might try to corroborate that with, you know, someone
else that has that knows a person and there and they know
that their signal name is XY or Z.
The power of subpoena only goes so far in that what Signal
doesn't have, they can't give over.
And just as there's data minimization when it comes to us
protecting our own devices, Signal employs data minimization
in that they don't retain records longer than they have to
just to make that communication possible.
And So what they, what we've seen and you can go to
signal.org/bigbrother to kind of see some of these law
enforcement requests is that they have access to, for
instance, when an account was created and what the last time
that account was logged into. But they don't really have
information beyond that because they don't retain it.
They throw it out, they don't keep it in the first place.
They employ strict data minimization in order to ward
off the possibility that their users will become vulnerable to,
you know, law enforcement requests or requests or even
hacks. You know, if their servers are
hacked, then a remote hacker could get access to who is who
and any records that they have. So they try to make sure that
that doesn't happen by simply not having those requests, those
that data to give over. My last question for you, Bill,
do you listen to techno? What kind of music do you like?
We listen to a lot of techno around here.
Thanks to Mike. Does Kraut rock count?
Yes, Techno. Okay, yes, now we're here.
Are you listening to? Can you fuck with?
Can I love? Can I love?
Can All right okay, now we got 3.
Okay, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, OK. It was great.
Faust, you. Fucking I need my vitamin C and
Faust and yeah, I yeah, like Tangerine Dream.
Wow, yeah, okay, okay, I get down with.
That cuts. Deep cuts.
Well, I love Tangerine Dream. We got we got a real 1 here
folks. Yeah, absolutely.
We should get make sure he gets the make sure he gets the free
premium subscription that comes with being a guest because we do
album Rex at the end of our of those episodes.
Bill, thank you so much for for coming and and hopefully this
has been a valuable service to our listeners, particularly, you
know, as the summer months start approaching, we're getting into
the spring summer. Is there going to be a lot of
people on the streets and. My pleasure.
I hope everybody is is, I hope everybody is, you know, watching
out for themselves and, and, and listening to this and thinking
about how they can protect themselves with signal.