[tripzilch]

well it's only baseless speculation if you can provide at least one plausible alternative so we can say, "we don't know which is true".

niksakl's point is that the go-to "probably nothing going on" or the other "WhatsApp too popular to block so we block Signal instead" explanations are just not plausible at all.

So I don't think it's entirely baseless, and with this new information, even less so.

And Egypt making such a deal with a large company, you make it sound like you believe that's implausible, but this has in fact happened before: When Egypt hired Nokia and Siemens to develop, build and implement their DPI infrastructure. Later claiming "gosh we never expected they'd actually use this to hunt down, torture and kill dissidents". Maybe governments aren't that naive, but corporations surely will try and claim to be.