Waltz's team set up at least 20 Signal group chats for crises across the world

One nice side effect of Signal's importance for governmental/military use is that it helps keep it free for civilian use. They can't mandate a backdoor for something other parts of the government rely on to be secure.

I once heard a great anecdote to that effect, and to my embarrassment I can't recall the details to repeat here.

(And yes, I understand that there are limits on what is appropriate to share with civilian hardware on a civilian network, but the truth stands that part of the reason there's not a push to breach encryption in the US like there is in the UK is because Signal is relied upon even by the government when they need a private channel on civilian hardware.)

Lol. No.

BlackBerry was in the same position, and it was absolutely backdoored from a crypto perspective. The FBI doesn’t cry about iPhones anymore, so they’ve likely (along with other entities) identified alternate methods to access communications.

The use of these sorts of actions are about avoiding accountability, not security. Again, BlackBerry is the exemplar — PIN messaging was tied to a device, not a user. People 20 years ago were doing these signal chats with BlackBerry devices, swapping them around physically to build these groups.

Even then, people in these positions of power weren’t as reckless and incompetent. In addition to the reporter, one of the participants was on a civilian phone in Russia. The FSB or whomever does their signals intelligence got a real-time feed of intelligence, military operations, etc. The American pilots were put at risk, and Israeli spies were burned.

> The FBI doesn’t cry about iPhones

Is there any evidence that iPhones have some security exploit that Apple + Three letter agencies can use?