Signal CEO Meredith Whittaker Credit – Florian Hetz—The Washington Post/Getty Images
Meredith Whittaker remembers exactly where she was when she read the story that would spark the first major crisis of the second Trump Administration—the debacle that became known as Signal-gate.
The president of encrypted messaging app Signal was sitting at her kitchen table in Paris, when somebody in one of her Signal group chats sent her a link to the March 24 article. Whittaker read, slack-jawed, about how President Trump’s then-national security advisor Mike Waltz had added the editor of the Atlantic magazine, apparently accidentally, to a Signal group chat where senior officials discussed forthcoming military strikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen.
She finished the story and shared it with her colleagues. “And then I went back and I read it again, because I was like, What the f-ck,” Whittaker tells TIME. “It had all the elements of a soap opera.” A month later, the New York Times reported U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had used a separate Signal chat to share similar details about military strikes.
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Whittaker’s main concern, in the aftermath, was protecting the image of Signal. The messaging app, as the story demonstrated, has become commonly used by government officials around the world, as well as journalists, human rights defenders, and regular people seeking privacy. Signal doesn’t share user numbers, but estimates put them at around 70 million. The app’s encryption is widely seen as the best in the industry—the surest guarantee that messages can only be read by their sender and the intended recipients. Whittaker’s team was keen to stress, in background calls with journalists, that Waltz’s security breach was a user error, and the security of Signal itself wasn’t in dispute. “How do we make sure, however this story moves, that the integrity of Signal itself is not speciously called into question?” Whittaker recalls asking her colleagues. Her team’s goal, she says, was to make sure the crisis roiling the Trump Administration did “not become something that endangers the fundamental right to private communication that Signal exists to ensure.”
In the end, Signal emerged from the episode even stronger. (Waltz, not so much—Trump demoted him several weeks later.) The app saw a large spike in downloads in the immediate aftermath, a sign users were confident in its security. It also saw an uptick in donations. (30% of its running costs are now covered by small donors, with the rest coming mainly from foundations and large donors, a spokesperson says.) The app, run by a non-profit, consciously rejects the surveillance business model that drives most of the tech industry. “We believe that the right to privacy should be universal, and the ability to communicate privately, even in this world, should persist, and we are building what I believe is the most important technical infrastructure in the world to enable the right to privacy,” Whittaker says.
TIME spoke with Whittaker on May 20. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The world has been pretty chaotic for a while now, but it feels like in the last couple of years it has only sharpened. How important is Signal in this current moment?
People want privacy. People are creeped out. People are uneasy. People recognize that the status quo in tech is not safe or savory, and for whatever reason they are trying to find, and in the case of Signal are finding, alternatives that actually give them meaningful privacy.
Anyone who does human rights work or investigative journalism understands that in many cases, it is the difference between life and death. We know throughout history that centralized power constitutes such power via information asymmetry. The more they know, the more stable and lasting their power is. This is the type of domination through knowledge that makes or breaks empires. Ultimately, we are in a world in which the power to know us has been ceded to the tech industry. So ensuring [privacy] in a world where the authority to know us has been ceded to private actors who may or may not cooperate with one or another regime, who may choose to use that data to manipulate or to harm us or to exclude us from access to resources, is existentially important. This is the basis on which I claim, without flinching, that Signal is the most important technical infrastructure in the world right now.
Where were you when you first read the Atlantic story?
I was at my kitchen table, which, although I have a desk, is usually where I work. We have many, many Signal chats with folks who think and care about issues of privacy, and somebody in one of those dropped that story in the chat, and I opened it, and I read it, and then I put it in our team chat, where our core team shares information. And then I went back and I read it again, because I was like, What the f-ck.
It had all the elements of a soap opera. And we are living in soap operatic times, so I had to go back and make sure I was not just deficient on caffeine or not clocking exactly what had happened. And I reread it, and I was like, okay, damn. This is a mess. But I think the full implications didn’t hit me. Like, the bombs had fallen. People were dead. This was a real military operation that had been executed and operationalized the same way as my friends and I meeting in Prospect Park for a frisbee. But the consequences ricocheted. I did not at the time anticipate that Signal would become such a main character in the story.
You must have known, long before that, that Signal was commonly used by government officials, right?
We know because people tell us. So it was an article of faith. I didn’t know specifically who and where and how it was used. And that’s by design. You could come to my dining room table and put a gun to my head and say, give me that data. And literally, I could not give you that data, because we have gone to such extremes to ensure that we also don’t know.
Have you had any meetings with Trump Administration officials since that point? If so, what did you talk about?
No, we don’t work directly with governments as a rule.
Many governments are trying to attack encryption—to get companies to build in back doors to their systems. But at the same time, many of them are using the technology themselves. Do you see an irony there?
I do see an irony. It’s a very long standing irony. It’s an irony that is sort of based on a magical thinking, as we’ve called it, where there is a desire to have for me, but not for thee, which is fundamentally not possible when it comes to encryption. Either it works for everyone, the person you hate the most in the world, the person you love the most in the world, Both need to have access, or it doesn’t work, or we live in a world where communications privacy is not possible, where we cannot express ourselves, our intimacies, our doubts, our excoriation of corruption without those expressions being surveilled and potentially weaponized against us.
Write to Billy Perrigo at billy.perrigo@time.com.
