Joe Rogan is famously of a conspiratorial bend of mind. But the concerns that he expressed recently on his JRE podcast such as the government snooping on people’s personal lives and conversations, especially famous people, seem to have some merit if the claims made by one of his friends are true. Why? Well, because of the case of his friend and conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson, who had claimed that his private chats on e-mail and messaging service ‘Signal’ were being monitored by the US government.

This happened despite the service being end-to-end encrypted and supposed to be inaccessible to any outside parties. “I don’t even know like how much of that encrypted messaging stuff works, you know. I know when Tucker was saying that he was organizing that meeting with Putin in Russia and that the government called him up because they knew that he was meeting Putin because they had access to his Signal. And he’s like ‘What you have access to, I didn’t even know someone could get into my signal, I thought that was encrypted.’ Nope,” Rogan told fitness entrepreneur Bert Sorin on episode #2242 of his JRE podcast.

In addition, this has made the UFC commentator and his friends, including Elon Musk skeptical of any so-called encrypted messaging services. This is perfectly reasonable and understandable. After all, if there is a way that the government has found a backdoor to get into Signal (and other messaging services’) chats, they’re not going to tell the public. This means people will use these thinking they’re secure when they actually aren’t, which is even more dangerous than using a non-secure service with the understanding their conversation may be read.

“They can get in there. So it’s like how much of this stuff is really how much of it is really encrypted and protected and how much would they even let you know if they can break?… They’ve spilled the beans… I know a lot of people including Elon Musk have started questioning Signal… All they have to do is know your phone number,” Rogan added. But the Putin interview wasn’t the first time Carlson had claimed he was being spied on by the US government.

Tucker Carlson alleges being spied upon

Tucker Carlson had claimed as far back as 2021 (when he was still on Fox News) that the NSA was snooping on him. The former Fox host had said on his show that the National Security Agency (NSA) was intercepting his communications, and he knew this because someone in the agency had told him.

The NSA predictably, promptly denied these allegations and claimed that Carlson was not a target of their intelligence activities. But then again, the agency isn’t going to accept it was snooping on Carlson even if it was doing so. No whistleblower has come out publicly to confirm Carlson’s allegations either, but that doesn’t mean much either.

Of course, the NSA snooping on Americans is nothing new. Former CIA and NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, came out publicly, alleging that the agency was conducting extensive surveillance on Americans- collecting their phone records and internet history. Further, the whistleblower claimed that the NSA even had access to information collected by major tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Apple. And if Carlson’s allegations are true, then it seems little has changed since Snowden’s revelations. What do you think about Rogan’s take on government snooping?