Reverse engineering the Parler app to scrape all the public content from Jan 6 (including content marked "deleted" but not yet deleted) is a "hack". It's an unexpected and really cool thing that we didn't expect.
I suppose this also is political, but what makes it a "hack" has nothing to do with politics. What makes it a hack is that people have orthodox beliefs about public scraping of websites that this challenged.
I mention this because large parts of the so-called "hacking" community are in fact defenders of orthodoxy. Instead of breaking rules they are very much concerned with policing rules.
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If this sounds like a wackjob conspiracy theory, it's because this is a wackjob conspiracy theory. Signal's source code and algorithms are open. Just because some government departs have given it funding doesn't mean it's a secret plot by the CIA.
Signal uses well-known crypto algorithms. If they are insecure, well, then all cryptography is insecure and it doesn't matter which encrypted messaging app you use.
If there's a backdoor in the code, well, the code is open source and people would be able to find it.
Here's is the "censorship episode" of the show "WKRP in Cincinnati", where you see Andy (radio station program director) argue "free enterprise" against preacher "Dr. Bob Hallier" who is using boycotts to get them to remove music from the radio:
Most of what you know of the 1980s hacking scene wasn't Internet, but "phone phreaking" and "BBSs". I don't know much about those things. I was an Internet hacker instead -- on the net since back before DNS was a thing (when 'hosts.txt' was distributed by hand).
By the late 1980s, computers from Sun Microsystems were a big deal. Yet, Sun (and other manufacturers) were immune to notifications of vulnerabilities. Issues had to be handle by tech support, and if you didn't have a support contract, you didn't matter.
This is an exceptionally lazy argument on a platform known for lazy arguments. There are people who consistently oppose censorship on principle, whether it's censoring Trumpists, censoring terrorists, or censoring any other disliked group;
If activists came to Signal with the phone numbers of identified Proudboys members, as well as the contents (retrieved from phones) of messages they sent via Signal planning an insurrection, what should Signal do?
The "First Amendment" only deals with government restriction of free speech. You may not like a private company censoring your speech, but it's not a "First Amendment" issue. Indeed, the First Amendment means government can't stop private censorship.
Moreover, "Orwellian" is less about a totalitarian state and more about how politicians make lies that sound truth -- such as a senator claiming to be a constitutional lawyer making one of the most common and basic mistakes about the First Amendment.
This "voter integrity" issue is more doublethink, by the way, and EXACTLY what Orwell was talking about. It was about searching desperately for any excuse that could plausibly be exploited to turn the election in Trump's favor.