Much has been said about the idea of ‘signal leaving UK or EU’. Little has been said about how exactly that would happen.
AFAIK, Signal has no business presence in the UK or EU. IE, no offices, no registered corporate entities. Thus, they (arguably) have no more requirement to comply with UK’s or EU’s regulations than, say, Iran’s or China’s or any other jurisdiction where they do not do business and have no presence.
Signal’s leadership has a record of giving any regional restrictions the middle finger, so I doubt Signal would voluntarily block EU countries. So that means the EU would either pressure Google and Apple to delist Signal (easily worked around, at least on Android, and soon on Apple too as EU is trying to force sideloading) or they’d pressure ISPs to block connections to Signal (more or less impossible).
If EU tried to do that, it’d just create a giant game of whack-a-mole. And people doing real CSAM shit would just move to even more private distributed systems.
And that’s exactly why Ukraine is kicking ass. Paying $20k or $30k for a single enemy casualty is a pretty good deal in warfare. But these drones aren’t going through some huge defense contractor, they’re being 3D printed and assembled from off-the-shelf parts. Basically a little army of logistics people building hobby drones out of consumer level equipment, just with an improvised explosive like a grenade or some similar impact explosive strapped to the bottom.
They aren’t even paying $20k for a casualty, they are paying $1-2k for a hobby drone and a grenade and many of them create multiple casualties.
The more expensive ones cost more, but those are the ones you see that are reusable and can drop several grenades in one flight. Those are more like $5k-$20k. Still an insane bargain even if each one only creates one casualty before it is destroyed.