So what does all this mean for American users—including conservative dissidents—who believe that Signal is a secure application for communication? It means that they should be cautious. “Maher’s presence on the board of Signal is alarming,” says national security analyst J. Michael Waller. “It makes sense that a Color Revolutionary like Maher would have interest in Signal as a secure means of communicating,” he says, but her past support for censorship and apparent intelligence connections raise doubts about Signal’s trustworthiness.

As she once explained, she abandoned the mission of a free and open Internet at Wikipedia, because those principles recapitulated a “white male Westernized construct” and “did not end up living into the intentionality of what openness can be.”