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Before anyone indulges in this kind of adventurism please be aware of the possible consequences: The United States has now partly outsourced their intelligence

Before anyone indulges in this kind of adventurism please be aware of the possible consequences: The United States has now partly outsourced their intelligence gathering to BigTech ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM ) and has also made laws to compel any company to allow US agencies to tap into their network (see Why Lavabit shutdown? - https://it.slashdot.org/story/14/05/20/2143258/why-lavabit-shut-down https://it.slashdot.org/story/14/05/20/2143258/why-lavabit-s... ) with whom they don't have an explicit arrangement. So it is important to note that your actions may be helping US / 5-eyes / 9-eyes intelligence agencies. This is important to keep in mind as you are being asked to take sides in an international conflict and help circumvent the laws of one country. And this may have negative repercussion for you in the future. For example, you don't have any guarantees that Signal will not use these proxies for other countries too, and that could create legal trouble for you in your own country if they have a good relation with the country whose communication network / laws you are helping to circumvent. Or, you may become a person of interest in Iran or other countries for doing this and be a potential target for them which can create legal difficulties for you in the future in which case international travel may become difficult for you. (Yes, I am outlining the worst-case scenarios). Do remember that you will be responsible for the traffic that flows through this proxy and may not have similar legal protections like telecom or or communication platforms run by corporates do. I write this because I too was once naive about how the Internet would change the world by making information open and accessible to all and bring us all closer with the ability to freely communicate through it. The reality today is a lot more sobering - the internet has been siloed and while information technically is still freely available it's very controlled, it is being used to profile people at a massive scale, experiments are being done through social networks to use them to deliberately create social and political turmoil in many countries, platforms like Wikipedia and Google Maps or Open street maps are being increasingly used to entice naive people to share and make even more information public without understanding the repercussion of how it may be used against their country, and worst of all, attempts are being made to replace your own country's communication network with it ... (Signal is also one of the new controlled silos of the internet and not an open, interconnected or distributed platform like the internet was originally envisioned by some). So go ahead and do this if you believe it will do political good, but do it it with your eyes open.

Crispness9889 4y ago
Are you not just acting as a middleman? so encrypted data goes to you and forwarded to signal servers and all you have going through your network is encrypted? I'm a complete amateur but I thought everything sent from signal was encrypted right from the get go and "not possible" to decrypt mid-transit?
- webmobdev 4y ago
  Yes, a proxy acts as a middleman. But as the blog post itself points out, When you publicly post a signal.tube link, or if a particular server becomes too popular, it increases the chance that Iranian censors will simply add those IPs to their block list. authorities can track how the information flows, which can be used to identify you (for e.g. through the proxy IP). With foreign encrypted networks, police / intelligence now focus more on getting the device that sent or received the message, rather than intercepting the message by breaking the encryption, as that is an easier method to get all the communication. (And remember that Signal uses phone numbers as identifiers, which really makes it easy for law enforcement to track someone in any investigation). So if someone has been tagged as suspect "terrorist" by the Iranians, and they determine that your proxy has enabled that suspect to bypass their laws and use Signal, you can be liable for aiding and abetting "terrorism".
  - Crispness9889 4y ago
    Ah, they just go to the source and deal with it there instead of trying to crack the message. But am I understanding correctly, that if you used this thing, what is flowing through your network would all be encrypted stuff, basically just noise to anyone who isn't either the sender or signal? (if none of the devices in this has been compromised)
    - webmobdev 4y ago
      Yes, that is what Signal claims - the data is encrypted and they try to disguise it as much as possible to look like normal internet traffic. But governments around the world also make equal effort to ensure they can identify the different traffic that flows through their internet infrastructure.

Crispness9889 4y ago

Are you not just acting as a middleman? so encrypted data goes to you and forwarded to signal servers and all you have going through your network is encrypted? I'm a complete amateur but I thought everything sent from signal was encrypted right from the get go and "not possible" to decrypt mid-transit?

webmobdev 4y ago
Yes, a proxy acts as a middleman. But as the blog post itself points out, When you publicly post a signal.tube link, or if a particular server becomes too popular, it increases the chance that Iranian censors will simply add those IPs to their block list. authorities can track how the information flows, which can be used to identify you (for e.g. through the proxy IP). With foreign encrypted networks, police / intelligence now focus more on getting the device that sent or received the message, rather than intercepting the message by breaking the encryption, as that is an easier method to get all the communication. (And remember that Signal uses phone numbers as identifiers, which really makes it easy for law enforcement to track someone in any investigation). So if someone has been tagged as suspect "terrorist" by the Iranians, and they determine that your proxy has enabled that suspect to bypass their laws and use Signal, you can be liable for aiding and abetting "terrorism".
- Crispness9889 4y ago
  Ah, they just go to the source and deal with it there instead of trying to crack the message. But am I understanding correctly, that if you used this thing, what is flowing through your network would all be encrypted stuff, basically just noise to anyone who isn't either the sender or signal? (if none of the devices in this has been compromised)
  - webmobdev 4y ago
    Yes, that is what Signal claims - the data is encrypted and they try to disguise it as much as possible to look like normal internet traffic. But governments around the world also make equal effort to ensure they can identify the different traffic that flows through their internet infrastructure.