Using a throwaway for obvious reasons... I am grateful these are being worked on because they are extremely needed for some use cases.

I have been part of a group organizing protest in Beirut and I was surprised there was no clearly go to app that provided the security features we need.

We started off with WhatSapp because that's what everyone used before security became a concern. We then moved to Signal mostly to get auto-deleting messages. We then ran away to Telegram because there was no way to kick a compromised phone outside of a Signal group.

We considered using Wire which seemed to have what we needed but the interface was a bit clunky and it did not run well on all the phones of the group... We are currently evaluating an considering Keybase.io which seems to have all the feature too, but not sure how it will handle about a hundred people in the group...

If anyone has ideas about which apps are recommended for that (or has additional useful things) please help, the main things we need are:

- Encryption E2E is nice to have but not a deal breaker.

- Possibility to kick a user from the group, deal breaker ( a thug stole someone's phone in the protest once and another time we got a message saying someone's security code changed then they became inaccessible) both incidents ended up ok but there was no way to kick the person out of the group and proceed while clearing things out with signal.

- no old history kept of the conversation. Either auto-deleting messages set to short duration like signal, or if not possible we can survive with an admin at home deleting old messages constantly and clearing the chat for everyone in sensitive situations ( like telegram allows)

- Free. For various reasons, some people can't buy apps no matter how cheap.

- easy to use. Most protesters are not too technical.

- possibility to display sender and group but not the content of messages in the notifications.

- having an easy way to add password to the app itself. (nice to have)

- making screenshots inconvenient to take (just nice to have).

- Not tied to phone numbers also really nice to have but not mandatory.

Our main threat is riot police and pro government thugs taking protesters phones and forcing people to unlock them or running away before the phone is locked then snooping around. Very rarely are people alone when this happens so we almost always get a notification that X is compromised, so we clear chats and kick them out of the group before their phones are really compromised.

I don't think the government is running sophisticated deep packet inspection. I don't think our group has been infiltrated but that is always a possibility.

We are also trying to find some free device management solution to remotely track / lock and maybe wipe phones when they get taken.

Sorry for the wall of text... just though now might be a good time to ask...

user:	beyprotester
created:	December 10, 2019
karma:	14