Apple Hires Developer Behind Signal, Edward Snowden's Favorite Secure Chat App

by Jon Russell
Techcrunch
Feb. 26, 2016

Apple hires plenty of interns all year round, but one particular addition revealed this week caught the eye given the company's current position opposing a controversial order to enable the FBI to access the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters.

Frederic Jacobs, a Switzerland-based developer who worked to develop secure messaging app Signal -- the communications app of choice for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden -- announced today that he is joining the Cupertino-based company this summer to work in its CoreOS security team. Jacobs spent two and half years with Whisper Systems, the company behind Signal, before leaving earlier this year.

I'm delighted to announce that I accepted an offer to be working with the CoreOS security team at Apple this summer.
— Frederic Jacobs (@FredericJacobs) February 25, 2016

Signal has been praised by the cybersecurity community for its robustness. Snowden, for one, said he uses it daily. It was one of the few apps to receive top marks for security in an EFF survey, while Jonathan Å¹dziarski, a security researcher who has been much cited in Apple's battle with the FBI, praised it for revealing "virtually nothing" when put through its paces with data excavation tools.

It's unclear exactly what Jacobs' role will be at Apple, but his hiring comes at a time when the firm is under major pressure. Apple increases the security measures within iOS with every major software release, but yesterday news broke that the company is working to remove the current passcode-free recovery option from future iPhones, while it wants to begin encrypting iPhone backups on iCloud.

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