Comment on In the battle of Telegram vs Signal, Elon Musk casts doubt on the security of the app he once championed

Elon Musk, co-founder of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of X Holdings Corp., speaks at the Milken Institute's Global Conference at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California.Apu Gomes/Getty ImagesElon Musk once championed encrypted messaging app Signal, promoting its user privacy protections.Signal has been sharply criticized recently by a conservative activist and a rival app, Telegram.Musk got on board with the criticisms and is propelling the encryption wars forward.The encryption wars brewing between the messaging apps Telegram and Signal have attracted the commentary of a high-profile critic: Elon Musk.Musk, who previously championed Signal for its user privacy protections, now appears to have changed his tune, amplifying criticisms of the app and its leadership and saying there are unspecified "known vulnerabilities" within Signal that have gone unaddressed by the company's leadership.Given his influence in the tech sphere, Musk's remarkable reversal on Signal has become central to the current conversation on encryption — and, according to one cryptography expert, is pushing users toward less secure alternatives.A conniption over encryptionIn recent weeks, Signal has come under fire from Pavel Durov, the CEO of rival app Telegram, who lambasted Signal's encryption capabilities in a public post on his own platform, saying, "the US government spent $3M to build Signal's encryption," and accusing Signal of being an insecure choice for private messaging."An alarming number of important people I've spoken to remarked that their 'private' Signal messages had been exploited against them in US courts or media," Durov wrote.While Durov didn't detail the allegations, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson previously claimed in an episode of the "Full Send Podcast" without evidence that the NSA broke into his Signal account before his trip to Moscow to interview Russian President Vladimir Putin."But whenever somebody raises doubt about their encryption, Signal's typical response is 'we are open source so anyone can verify that everything is all right,'" Durov's post continued.