'Nothing Is Secure': Tucker Carlson Accuses NSA Of Intercepting And Leaking Encrypted Signal Chats

Conservative media personality and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has dismissed the notion that Signal is secure, alleging that it is not possible to prevent the big intel services from reading your texts or hearing on your calls.

What Happened: Carlson made the allegation during an interaction on the Lex Fridman Podcast. He claims that the National Security Agency (NSA) spied on him two years ago and once again when before he left for his interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"I was being surveilled by the US government, intensely surveilled by the US government. And this came out, they admitted it."

In June 2021, Carlson claimed that a whistleblower informed him that the NSA was spying on him. The agency, however, denied the claims and said it focuses on foreign threats, reported BBC.

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However, Carlson maintained that the NSA admitted to spying on him.

"The NSA admitted it a couple of years ago that they were up in my Signal account, and then they leaked it to the New York Times. They did that again before I left."

Carlson thinks U.S. intelligence agencies also knew about his meeting with former CIA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden.

"I didn't tell anybody and I didn't text it to anybody, okay, except him. Semafor runs this piece reporting information they got from the US Intel agencies leaking against me."

Why It Matters: This is a serious allegation since Signal is end-to-end encrypted. Here's what the app's makers have to say:

"Signal conversations are always end-to-end encrypted, which means that they can only be read or heard by your intended recipients. Privacy isn't an optional mode — it's just the way that Signal works."

Security firm Kaspersky backs up these claims, and Signal's source code is public as well, so anyone interested can openly examine it.

If intelligence agencies can spy even on Signal conversations and calls, there might not be many secure communication apps out there. However, there is no evidence yet to suggest it is possible.

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Photo courtesy: Kremlin