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EU Commission to staff: Switch to Signal messaging app

politico.eu

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Re: EU Commission to staff: Switch to Signal messaging app

#231

Post by mtnGoat »

yardie wrote: post #224
Seenso wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All US ambassadorships are political appointment, therefore option 2 is the only answer. These positions are almost always ceremonial. They are there to execute the will of the president. Not really, a foreign service officer can be appointed by a president to be an ambassador. A recent example from the news is Marie Yovanovitch. In regular times, my impression was that foreign service officers were appointed to th…

A president can appoint a politically connected friend or choose one from the diplomatic corp. But in any case they are all political appointments selected by the president. Now, for sensitive countries you want a specialist. Like your probably not sending golfing buddies to broker Israel/Palestine peace agreements. But they'll probably do alright being the Ambassador to Belgium or Canada. Those embassies are practic…

In this case instead of a golfing buddy, his son-in-law was appointed to deal with Israel/Palestine.

Nepotism is a problem, as is cronyism.

Re: EU Commission to staff: Switch to Signal messaging app

#232

Post by ptsneves »

mcv wrote: post #39
101404 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the government in Germany does IT projects, they usually burn millions of Euros even for simple projects. And then, years after the planned rollout, the project is still unfinished and no politician wants to touch it anymore. My favorites was the "special email inbox for lawyers". So, I am somewhat hesitant to let the EU develop a chat client.

The Dutch government is also often terrible at managing IT projects. It seems an industry has evolved to game the public procurement rules required by the EU. Those companies just leech money for never-ending IT projects that tend to be over budget, over time, and working poorly.

In Portugal there is this thing called viactt which is a crappy reinvention of email. The issue is that it is mandated that official communications with the state be done like through it. It emulates the conventional mail so much that the "letter" contains a picture of the stamps. If you are a company it is the official way of communication. It was done as part of a modernization initiative but now everybody just hates it due to its general uselessness and rare usage.

Re: EU Commission to staff: Switch to Signal messaging app

#234

Post by iudqnolq »

dependenttypes wrote: post #88
xmdx wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why reinvent the wheel? Signal does the job, doesn't store data, not even metadata, and can be used immediately.

> doesn't store data, not even metadata Isn't that just a promise? Also, even then, it is based on your contacts, which are seen by google.

You can see it from their court filings. I think it's an amazing technical accomplishment that the only information they have stored in the clear under a user's phone number is the last connection date and account creation date.

https://www.aclu.org/open-whisper-systems-subpoena-documents

You can also disable contact backup on Android.

Re: EU Commission to staff: Switch to Signal messaging app

#235

Post by msh »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #206
xmdx wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why reinvent the wheel? Signal does the job, doesn't store data, not even metadata, and can be used immediately.

Signal does store important metadata: the phone number itself. In many countries, you cannot purchase a SIM card now without showing ID, and the seller takes down your ID details and forwards them to the state. Then your phone number is inextricably linked to your identity. Yes, the contents of messages may be securely encrypted, but many states can easily determine which of their own citizens (and visitors to the co…

And in this context it's probably not a issue.

Re: EU Commission to staff: Switch to Signal messaging app

#236

Post by dzink »

heymijo wrote: post #169
bambataa wrote: post #144

I once worked in the Commission, briefly. Technical security seemed to be non-existent as far as I could tell (in an admittedly very junior role). Once all of the interns got invited to the U.S. embassy to meet the Ambassador (some guy who literally said he got the job because he was friends with Obama). On the way out the nice embassy staff gave us goodie-bags, complete with handy pen drives... Basically everyone wa…

> some guy who literally said he got the job because he was friends with Obama There are two kinds of U.S. ambassadors: 1) Career foreign service people 2) Friends of the presidential administration at the time Examples of the latter aren't hard to find. Off the top of my head I'm familiar with William Timken, a US businessman who was appointed Ambassador to Germany by George W. Bush because he was a huge supporter […

That’s interesting. Elsewhere (Eastern Europe during communism) ambassadors were often political opponents of the government - a form of isolation and payoff in a cushier government supported role abroad. Their job is to parrot the government’s policy instead of spreading their own.

Re: EU Commission to staff: Switch to Signal messaging app

#237

Post by laegooose »

StavrosK wrote: post #220
berkes wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal is not on F-Droid, because m0xie does not want that[1]. Some forks of Signal are, though[2]. [1] https://community.signalusers.org/t/how-to-get-signal-apks-o... [2] https://forum.f-droid.org/t/signal-in-f-droid-in-2018/2847

Ah, yes, I forgot about that. Too bad they don't even publish the APK on signal.org.

They do https://signal.org/android/apk/

Re: EU Commission to staff: Switch to Signal messaging app

#238

Post by dTal »

aguyfromnb wrote: post #100
dTal wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wordpress. Nothing stops you from explicitly publishing your communications. And whether you do it explicitly, or implicitly by using an insecure communication method, it's always a choice which you can revoke at any time.

> it's always a choice which you can revoke at any time. It looks like the replies to this comment misunderstand the point. It's not about one person choosing to make their communication public, but that there should be a record of government communication period . Have we not seen enough examples of our elected officials corruption in media that isn't encrypted? Now we want them to be able to communicate in all mann…

> Now we want them to be able to communicate in all manner with no accountability?

I think you misunderstood my point, which was that they can always do that. You can't stop them from using Signal, if they want to do something nefarious. Hell, they can just meet in a dark alley if they want. Sure, you can make it against the rules, but we are already presupposing rule-breaking (or else we would not need oversight).

So, if there's going to be some kind of disclosure system, let's make it structured and explicit. Just requesting that they use unencrypted communications, and then having some sort of unaccountable gray-hat institution (i.e. intelligence services) snoop on those communications, is a bad system.

Re: EU Commission to staff: Switch to Signal messaging app

#240

Post by patrickaljord »

zrm wrote: post #174
patrickaljord wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OS is US based too and they could easily keylog everything. Even if you wipe out the OS for a self-compiled one, there are blobs running full blown OS in the hardware and it has access to every single hardware resource, good luck getting rid of that one without building your own hardware and drivers from scratch.

> good luck getting rid of that one without building your own hardware and drivers from scratch. For an individual that is obviously infeasible. For the continent of Europe as a whole, it obviously isn't. Why shouldn't they put some money into developing cellphone hardware with open source drivers?

The size of the supply chain required for such an endeavor is so huge and spread among various countries and companies worldwide this would be a big task even for the EU. I mean, competing with the like of Broadcom and ARM from scratch. Good luck with that. Even then, the NSA would just need to pay or blackmail a single entity in the supply chain to get their backdoor in there. The EU itself would probably implement their own backdoor. Also open source doesn't mean it will be backdoor free https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/54in5s/the_nsa_has_t...
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