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With just a few exceptions, the people who signed this are sort of a who's-who of practical cryptographic research and, in particular, of research into cryptographic backdoors.
If that can help, I agree with "this particular issue is not a backdoor".
As a contingency plan in case this article gets the HN hug of death: http://archive.is/ACTOT
The latest episode of Risky Business podcast (risky.biz) had a good section with Alec Muffatt about this too.[0]
It's well worth listening to, with Alec being both considerate and colourful at the same time.
Disclaimer: regular listener, otherwise not affiliated.
0: http://risky.biz/RB439
https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/822301430933573632
The responses here are telling. The reasoning of a lot of people seems to be "WhatsApp isn't perfect, we should tell people not to use WhatsApp" without serious enough consideration what alternatives are actually likely to be usable and/or used.
Good example of "perfect is the enemy of good". In my experience this kind of behavior is extremely common in the security/privacy space, and it is exceptionally harmful to getting real user improvements out (which tend to require measured compromises).
Caveat -- personal reaction opinion, off the cuff:
If casual use is at stake, and you could care less about your metadata / network graph, agree with the gist, WhatsApp is fine, better than most options.
But Author's narrative shifts UX "Personas" multiple times, appealing to one Persona (general public) to argue for low friction usability, prioritizing delivery over confidentiality, and a different Persona who is under real (dismissively called 'imagined' when it is not imaginary) threat when talking about need for confidentiality and deniability (quote: 'very few people are the kind of “high risk” users that EFF refers to–and such users have very different considerations').
Even as the 'journalist talking to the public' persona, your sources graph is recognized as important enough that journalists will go to jail to protect it.
If you are one of the very few with 'different considerations', then (a) the original concerns are not wrong, and (b) switching your behavior based on a given message's stakes is probably bad.
And if you are one of the few, having people with nothing to hide more broadly adopt the less common apps too is healthy, as then they are not only used for dissembling.
Railing against Signal or other apps prioritizing C & I over A as less usable than WhatsApp doesn't further that end for Personas with something to lose.