If you haven’t been keeping up with the news lately, after the whole Signal fiasco, it appeared that USA government officials are using some fork called “Telemessage”.
That app claims to offer backup solutions for popular messengers including Signal, to comply with government directives. Funnily enough, their website got completely wiped, a large change from what it was a few months ago.
Putting aside all the issues that using a Signal fork exposes you to, it appears that despite their marketing, they could access plaintext messages.
Even better, according to 404 Media, the entire thing is now under investigation thanks to their reporting on the matter.
Edit: a senator asked for an investigation, my bad.
If you’re interested, I’ve archived the source code of both the Android and iOS apps on my GitLab instance (tho those aren’t rare):
Overall, it’s quite fun to look at this from the outside, but also a bit worrying.
And remember, if you switch to Signal, use the official version and don’t add random journalists to your convos.