The decision to use a signal knockoff was a planned and managed one, not just on a whim. Who's responsible for managing the phones?
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Don't speculate, the evidence is bad enough.
Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials
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Re: Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials
#12White House communications director previously revealed (after “Signalgate”) that Signal was an approved and whitelisted app for gov’t officials to have on work phones and even discuss top-secret matters on. But I haven’t heard that TeleMessage was approved (and I’d have serious questions if it were given the foreign intelligence factor). Anyone know if there is a clear answer to whether it’s been approved?
The White House communications director lies continually, so the value of that statement is nil.
Re: Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials
#13White House communications director previously revealed (after “Signalgate”) that Signal was an approved and whitelisted app for gov’t officials to have on work phones and even discuss top-secret matters on. But I haven’t heard that TeleMessage was approved (and I’d have serious questions if it were given the foreign intelligence factor). Anyone know if there is a clear answer to whether it’s been approved?
The correct answer is no one outside US Government IT knows for sure what is or isn't approved per their own rules. Every article (and comments therein) are just speculation and people trying to confirm their own biases, desperately looking for something to blame someone for, to produce more rage-bait and thus feed more ad clicks.
Every single article is written with the presumption that there are no actual IT people in the White House, that someone wheeled in a Starlink dish on a dessert cart in the yard which is somehow running the entire government. It's silly and ridiculous.
Re: Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials
#14White House communications director previously revealed (after “Signalgate”) that Signal was an approved and whitelisted app for gov’t officials to have on work phones and even discuss top-secret matters on. But I haven’t heard that TeleMessage was approved (and I’d have serious questions if it were given the foreign intelligence factor). Anyone know if there is a clear answer to whether it’s been approved?
The White House communications director lies continually, so the value of that statement is nil.
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Re: Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials
#15White House communications director previously revealed (after “Signalgate”) that Signal was an approved and whitelisted app for gov’t officials to have on work phones and even discuss top-secret matters on. But I haven’t heard that TeleMessage was approved (and I’d have serious questions if it were given the foreign intelligence factor). Anyone know if there is a clear answer to whether it’s been approved?
It was incontrovertibly approved as it is only installable via MDM.
A likely explanation is that the communications director (or the people informing her) wouldn’t know to distinguish between Signal the app, and a Signal compatible app that is nearly indistinguishable from Signal. A lot like Kleenex is a common term for tissue paper regardless of brand.
When the leak was first revealed, there was loud speculation about the legality of government chat messages being set to auto-delete. This additional revelation, about the use of TeleMessage, shows that someone with a security background has actually thought about these things. It makes perfect security sense to archive messages somewhere secure, off phone, for record keeping compliance while ensuring that relatively vulnerable phones don’t retain messages for very long. It’s also an easy explanation for why such an app was created in the first place. There is an obvious market for it.
Re: Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials
#16> 404 Media journalist Joseph Cox published a story pointing out that Waltz was not using the official Signal app, but rather "an obscure and unofficial version of Signal that is designed to archive messages"
Wow. And that's while their entire point of using Signal is to have conversations scrapped after a week to leave no no traces of criminal activity.
Re: Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials
#17> 404 Media journalist Joseph Cox published a story pointing out that Waltz was not using the official Signal app, but rather "an obscure and unofficial version of Signal that is designed to archive messages" Wow. And that's while their entire point of using Signal is to have conversations scrapped after a week to leave no no traces of criminal activity.
I don't think it follows that they selected the archiving messenger because they wanted disappearing messages. The whole disappearing messages thing was just internet speculation.
Re: Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials
#18> 404 Media journalist Joseph Cox published a story pointing out that Waltz was not using the official Signal app, but rather "an obscure and unofficial version of Signal that is designed to archive messages" Wow. And that's while their entire point of using Signal is to have conversations scrapped after a week to leave no no traces of criminal activity.
Distantly reminds me of the Nixon tapes ... what could go wrong?
I wonder what the people he communicated with knew / thought?
Re: Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials
#19I appended a 'd' to the end of the title to pre-empt objections that they're not still using it. If it's known for sure that they are, we can de-'d' that bit. Edit: this subthread is obsolete now - I took a phrase from the author's update to the article to use as the title above.
honest question, but you decided to go against the "don't change titles" rule to choose one unprovable point until another just as unprovable point is proven? it could be argued both ways with the same argument.
Re: Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials
#20There is new reporting that a hacker has breached the parent company, TeleMessage, including live data being passed across servers in production.
https://www.404media.co/the-signal-clone-the-trump-admin-use...
It was marked as a DUPE of this discussion, despite being a major new development https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43890034 Hopefully that decision can be reconsidered