Signal Security Checklist for Activists
Summary
A concise operational checklist for securing an activist Signal deployment — from installation through disappearing-message timers, safety-number verification, contact discovery, and device hygiene. The canonical short-form checklist used by digital-security trainers when they cannot fit the full EFF SSD curriculum into an hour.
Body
https://signal.org (canonical app)
The checklist treats Signal as a baseline rather than as a destination: the assumption is that the reader has already chosen Signal over SMS or commercial messengers and now needs to configure it for an activist threat model. [source: signal-security-checklist-activists] The sequence runs: install from the official source (App Store / Play Store / signal.org), enable a strong registration lock PIN, set disappearing-message timers for sensitive conversations, verify safety numbers out-of-band before trusting identity, disable lock-screen notification previews on phones at risk of seizure, and configure backups off-device. [source: signal-security-checklist-activists]
It is explicit about what Signal does not solve: the metadata of who-messages-whom and when remains visible to the Signal service and to anyone with a court order; group chats are not end-to-end encrypted against the service operator; sealed-sender metadata protections are a defence against passive network observers, not against legal compulsion. [source: signal-security-checklist-activists] The checklist pairs each recommendation with a short rationale an activist can repeat to a sceptical colleague — “why are disappearing-message timers worth the friction” — because the dominant failure mode in activist groups is the colleague who never set them. [source: signal-security-checklist-activists]
The checklist has become the de-facto one-hour curriculum for digital-security trainers covering a mixed group that needs to be on Signal by the end of the session. [source: signal-security-checklist-activists] It is published in English on an open-access site; translations exist in Spanish, French, and German, often credited to trainers adapting the checklist for local groups. [source: signal-security-checklist-activists]
Use it for
A pre-action briefing for a campaign’s communications; the closing segment of a one-hour digital-security training; a shared checklist to circulate before a sensitive campaign launch.