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

(www.politico.com)
295 points mdhb | 1 comments | 02 Apr 25 19:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.365s | source
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bsimpson ◴[02 Apr 25 19:47 UTC] No.43560742[source]▶
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.)

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alp1n3_eth ◴[02 Apr 25 20:39 UTC] No.43561254[source]▶
You'd be surprised how much the government would potentially hurt itself in its own confusion. Not all parts of it are aligned to the same beliefs / mission, and there are certainly parts that believe in the saying "Why are you worried if you have nothing to hide".
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1. aerostable_slug ◴[02 Apr 25 20:56 UTC] No.43561463[source]▶
There was a rather interesting criticism of the recent wide-ranging cuts to USAID that basically said it wasn't unlikely that some of that USAID money was being used in clandestine intelligence operations (supporting the tribe of this warlord or that, paying someone off, rewarding allegiances, whatever) that DOGE and perhaps even most at USAID would never, ever be cleared to know about. With the inability to prevent those aid packages from being cut without also blowing their operations, the intelligence community would just have to sit and watch it happen.

I of course have no way of knowing if that's true or not, or if it is what damage may have been done, but it's interesting to consider.