• Habahnow
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    3 days ago

    Would this be good publicity or bad publicity for signal?

    “Even government officials think we’re secure!”

    Or

    “Idiots actually think signal is secure for classified information”

    • ChumbleyBumbley@lemm.ee
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      3 days ago

      Signal is very secure, but your encryption doesn’t matter when you add unknown people to your encrypted chats.

      It’s like buying the most secure, unpickable door lock and giving the key with the address on it to a complete stranger

      • Abnorc@lemm.ee
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        3 days ago

        I don’t doubt Signal per se, but I am surprised that government officials would use it to discuss military plans. I would have thought the government would use something developed by the military just to be sure that it’s safe.

        Sure, they can vet the source code, but it seems more straightforward for the government to develop their own solution than create a team to vet the security of something that they didn’t write. Maybe it’s overkill, but I’d almost think they should be doing this on vetted hardware as well. Signal is also relatively new, and they had to have a way to discuss these things beforehand.

        • monarch@lemm.ee
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          3 days ago

          They don’t want to comply with government communition laws so they use signal instead.

        • Habahnow
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          3 days ago

          That’s what Buttigieg indicated. There are secure means of communicating classified information, with a process for ensuring people with clearance are the only ones allowed to view this information. I imagine those rules are in place exactly for this reason, to prevent accidental leaks.

          The rookies that Trump hired probably didn’t see the harm in doing it in this way, I mean come on, Signal is secure so what is there to worry about?

          Who knows what else has been leaked to the wrong people accidentally.

      • Siegfried@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        I would have expected the USA to have their own private network for this shit… such a meh nation nowadays

        • Habahnow
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          1 day ago

          They do have ways of talking of classified information. Coincidentally, it is more tedious than using Signal and you are forced to keep records of those conversations, things that these people didn’t want.

        • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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          3 days ago

          Security and messaging is tricky to get right. Government uses a lot of COTS stuff because it’s easier to have someone to sue when shit goes south.

          That’s not to say that everything involved here isn’t a flagrant violation of every protocol and procedure involved in protecting classified information. It is.

    • white_nrdy@programming.dev
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      2 days ago

      I think it’s gonna end up being bad. Mainly because most people are gonna hear on Fox News that this was due to some flaw in Signal, and just take that at face value. A lot of people are not gonna even read an article about why or what even happened.