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.)

> They can't mandate a backdoor for something other parts of the government rely on to be secure.

Why not? It wouldn't be difficult to have a backdoor in the civilian use-case that's disabled for government use.

Now the task of an adversary is to simply enable the backdoor rather than create it from scratch. The people using Signal for this are doing it on their own devices, so now you have multiple problems.

Eg how to get non technical people to know when they’re using the civilian version.

Alternative crazy universe: Just use the tech that was created for the government and does all the right things.