U.S. Senate staff can now use Signal | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Senate staff can now use Signal

zdnet.com

255 pointsbshanks85 comments

Pro: The government recognizes the value of a well-built encryption app and is using it.

Con: The government does this while still insisting that encryption should have a backdoor in it, thus creating the impression that Government officials deserve bulletproof encryption, but private citizens don't.

It would be interesting to see what happens to Signal if encryption legislation is ever enacted, and/or if it would continue to be used.

Congress regularly makes rules that apply to every other government employee except themselves.

* Have to use a government email for official business? Everyone else does but Congress

* Have to keep a record of all communications? Everyone else does but Congress

At least they passed a law that banned insider trading by Congress... but then they repealed the most important parts just a year later! [0]

So, I'm sure we'll see Congress enact a law that requires that all software have a backdoor, unless that software is used by a member of Congress, in which case the penalty for having a backdoor is life imprisonment.

[0] http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2013/04/16/177496...

The record keeping requirements are there on the executive branch because otherwise there may not be any paper trail at all. Contrast that to the legislative branch who's function is to explicitly create a written piece of legislation.

Congress is a different branch of government. This is basic separation of powers.

Yeah, the legislators should be as immune from legislation as the judiciary is from the judicial system and the executive is from executive action. Oh wait...

Nobody is saying anything of the sort. But it feels good to tear down ridiculous arguments of the "other side" that you come up with yourself, doesn't it?

You must have misread the thread.

Second poster up stated that Third poster up's note of "Congress does not have to abide by laws that they set", was separation of powers. Which is exactly what First poster up was talking about. That you say that nobody is saying anything of the sort, deliberately ignores the second post up, which does indeed claim that.

Separation of powers is nowhere near the absurd strawman argument that I was replying to.

Thanks for the backing, but I think you're using "Nth poster up" incorrectly - my understanding is that "first poster up" would be 1 place up - i.e. the comment you're directly replying to :P

Happens the world over, mate. Over on the other side of the planet in India, much fanfare and "nationalistic spirit" was expelled in banning funds from foreign nations to NGOs (which may or may not be a bad thing).

Then they turned around and surreptitiously passed a law allowing foreign funding for political parties (!). Such "nationalism" this. Similar stories are to be found on things like corruption/transparency/Biometric ID laws.

Frankly this is democracy in its true self; the self-righteous religion appears to share more and more in terms of theology with Communism and erstwhile utopian systems. I can't wait to see this whole (world) system go down the gutters, and when people open their eyes to this language game.

> Frankly this is democracy in its true self;

That I would agree with, but...

> I can't wait to see this whole (world) system go down the gutters, and when people open their eyes to this language game.

I do hope this is hyperbolic. I personally like our global technological civilization; with all its injustices it's still better than what we had in the past. Also, I don't like wars, and I definitely don't want to find myself in one.

I don't think the parent commenter is referring to going back to what there was before; a Marxist who wants to hasten the revolution, for example, is not arguing for the stage of historical development before capitalism (feudalism), rather he is arguing for the abolishment of classes altogether. That is the charitable reading, anyway.

No, I don't think the parent really wants to go back to the way things were. But I argue against something different - I argue against revolutions itself. The two points I made could be restated like this: our civilization is at a very fragile stage and a big enough revolution now could kick us back into pre-industrial level and keep us there, since all the easily available sources of energy have been already mined and used up. That, and revolutions are bloody, and frankly, I don't want to die yet.

A revolution is like hiring a new team to build Version 2 of your product from scratch: they end up repeating all the old mistakes. Successful software development and science both require well-controlled experiments where the effects of the change can be traced back to a cause.

They also require a management that is willing to iteratively rewrite core pieces of the software and release major versions with breaking changes. That is what is lacking in our government, and what fuels the frustration behind calls for revolution.

This is not democracy. Not one country in the world implement democracy. Some just enjoy a lot of freedom, and so they called themself democracy since it makes them feel good. But I've yet to see a country where the people use their power. Because that's what democracy is supposedly about : not just people having power, but taking the _responsibility_ to use power, over and over on the long run, to keep shaping their society.

Right now we delegate it at best to a group of people that are already filtered by money or status, which is oligarchy. Not that I don't enjoy my life in the oligarchy, but it's not democracy.

I'm sure (I hope) in a couple decades people will pity us the same way we pity Middle Age feudal systems' peasants, and laugh at us for being so easily brainwashed into thinking our states are actual democracies.

This is a bit no-true-scotsman-ich. There is no perfect democracy in the world, and there will never be, because theoretical democracy is not a stable state when real humans are involved.

> Then they turned around and surreptitiously passed a law allowing foreign funding for political parties

Can you point me to a source where I can read more about it?

Don't forget how they allow themselves to trade stocks based on their foreknowledge of legislation that will directly impact specific businesses or industries.

... to say nothing of their vote to retain the good parts of ACA for themselves alone.

You have to wonder if the three-letter agencies have found some backdoor or a vulnerability in the app that they think only they have access to. It's very suspicious to see them voluntarily give up control over so much critical information by approving Signal.

This approval was given by the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms, not exactly the government official most beholden to the opinions or preferences of spy agencies.

"the government" isn't a single unified entity. There are many congressmen and federal employees who strongly oppose backdoor-ing encryption. Please don't paint them all with the same brush.

If Congress was in favor of backdoors in encryption, we would have backdoors in encryption. When Congress agrees on something, it passes law.

The reality right now is that most members of Congress either don't want backdoors, or don't hold a strong enough opinion to want to upset the status quo.

That can change, of course, and we should all be taking steps to let Congress know that we don't want backdoors, that they are a bad idea. But it's not ideal to start from an incorrect sense of that everyone wants backdoors.

You have to find out what your member of Congress thinks. Luckily it's easy--they have a form on their site for questions from their constituents.

> When Congress agrees on something, it passes law

proposes* law ftfy

I think it's more situational and maybe a little revelatory. They state they would prefer a universe where they have backdoors into encryption. But, in a universe where encryption exists without backdoor(s), the strongest move is to go the route without a backdoor. This may also be them admitting to failing to crack this particular piece of encryption.

Well there is a case for having encryption and this isn't as first class of a parallel, but when GPS was young and primarily being used by the military they purposely skewed civilian readings. Eventually, they decided to not alter the civilian results; hopefully they can just get to this conclusion faster on encryption.

I feel like everyone except the government should be using Signal. Elected government communications should always be open to public audit. Or am I being naive?

When discussing material that is classified, I'd prefer if state actors could not hack our government's communications

Elected government officials ought to be monitored like lab rats, with their location and conversations constantly livestreamed over cspanopticon.gov to all interested citizens.

I agree, but I also disagree. There are many secrets they should not have, but there are many state secrets that should be secret. Just because a politician is a politician does not mean they should have no privacy but they should also expect to not be able to have secrets. It's all a fine line and it is really annoying.

It's really not that fine at all. It's their job. Everything related to their job should be tracked and publicly accounted for. When they are "off the clock" so to speak, they can have as much privacy as they want.

You overestimate the publics ability to be a good accountant

This does not sound very reasonable, what about meetings regarding diplomatic and military strategies? Should that be public?

I'm open to considering certain cases of specific redaction when it means protecting things like this. Also we might be able to have a delayed disclosure process that would declassify the records after a certain period of time or something.

You might enjoy reading The Circle.

While I tend to agree, regardless, auditing should probably accomplished by requiring managed devices that can slurp the signal data on disk.

This might already be the case and is much better then making senate use non-e2e secure communication software.

We need to incentivize people running for public office. Taking away privacy is not the way to do that. And I'm a complete advocate for openness in government where it matters, like in policy analysis--that's the field I work in (https://www.OSPC.org)

So escrow communications for future audits.

Isn't a certain 3 character agency already doing that for us

They're doing it, but certainly not for us.

You never know who's going to put their paws on that information...

Assuming 3-char agencies can't already decrypt it...

Government communications should eventually be made public, but they probably shouldn't always be initially or immediately public.

Whistleblowing and legal affairs come to mind -- whistleblowers need to feel secure in order to report misdeeds, and even elected officials have attorney privileges.

Those certainly aren't the only cases, but they're two examples where open probably isn't the right default for communications.

Short of mandating life recorders, there is reason to strike a balance between publishing what they say and letting them work without obsessing over the future publication of what they say.

Them obsessing about the future publication of their comments makes them think more about what they say, and more about how the impact will affect the future and their future career. It gives them a mooring post to understand how acting in the interest of the people relates to them. IMO it is only really a good thing.

No it doesn't. It gives them the motivation to find ways of communicating off the record.

That's like saying locks give burglars motivation to find ways of getting in, other than doors. Sure it does, but that doesn't mean that we should suddenly get rid of locks. Indeed, many of us take the opposite tack, and install security alarms and cameras to intentionally lock down the rest of the house.

Governors, Politicians, etc. are public servants. They are not there for their own good, they are there to follow the law, and the serve the interests of their constituents, and only that. Therefore it stands to reason that any communications they have with other officials, about official business, should be recorded as it is a matter of public record. It stops "he said she said" disputes. It helps us know about underhanded deals, unfair advantages, and many of the other things that people do when given such powers with no oversight.

I think this is a very optimistic and generous view of humanity.

Even with perfect life recorders I think you'd end up with a moribund apparatus playing 5 dimensional tic tac toe (that is, sensible people would call for letting them turn the damn things off whenever they wanted to).

Agreed, but it's very unlikely to happen any time soon, though there are definitely things that can be done.

If anyone wants to help out in collecting government communications using FOIA, please let me know. It's surprisingly easy to get bulk communications data of cities, though it ends up being very time consuming with everything considered. I could definitely use the help, especially with a project beyond the city level that started just this week.

Here's [1] an example of a dataset of ~2mo of email meta - about six million emails - I recently received from Houston, TX. (Thanks to Jeff Reichman at januaryadvisors.com for cleaning the data up!)

[1] https://data.world/sketchcity/city-of-houston-email-metadata...

I believe Signal can already deal with this, but the government would probably have to be forced by law to do it in a more explicit way.

Like, they can use self-disappearing messages, but all messages are automatically archived and encrypted with a pre-set password. I guess this could still open the data to being stolen if the password is discovered, but I don't really see any other solution to making both self-disappearing messages and FOIA requests working at the same time.

They're always doing secretive stuff that's more likely to be used against them by wolves in and outside our government. The value we get by whatever they say in public pales in comparison to those people getting their private stuff. I don't usually need to know their secret communications to infer what they're doing with the lobbying and law-making being public on top of the positions they push. I'd rather the greatest tyrants here and there not have dirt on them, though. I'd reluctantly protect them if forced to make a choice on the issue.

So if I email my representative should the communication be open or not?

What if a whistleblower wants to communicate with their elected representative who will then raise and highlight an issue?

Sometimes it's vital that people be able to communicate in private with their reps.

And that is why Signal needs to free itself from the phone number...

I came here to say the same thing!

I'm a Signal user and hugely appreciate their push to bring encryption to the masses.

But when it comes to the government, I believe the ideal situation is that there is a literal live-stream of everything they are doing, at all times. Government officials are public servants. Sure, if you're discussing an ongoing military operation, keep it behind closed doors temporarily. But the vast majority of what they're doing should be made accessible to the public in real-time.

The only reason not to do so is to hide lobbyism, partisanship, and corruption from the public eye.

Zdnet is writing about security and publishing a PGP public key on an unencrypted site

PKI public key trust is not based on channel encryption.

There's nothing wrong with putting public keys on an unencrypted site, though those retrieving the key may want to consider that their access of it may be visible.

Sounds like a good idea to me. It will demonstrate to lawmakers the advantages and necessity of encryption.

I value both privacy and accountability. How do you make both happen in the case of public workers, and if it can't be done, what's the proper balance?

Key quorums and escrow are an option.

If a quorum of some m < n keys can be used to reconstruct a key, and those n keys are distributed amongst a set of generally trusted and coercion-resistant entities, then the option exists for a quorum to be formed under specific protocols which would make the relevant decrypting key available.

In the case of PKI, there's the added twist that the sending party is encrypting to the recipient's public key. If no self-encrypted copy is retained, this means that an escrow policy on the sender need not make available any copies of messages sent -- say, a national legislator. The method would allow for accessing the messages received, however.

(And if the received messages referenced the sent ones, you'd have that content as well.)

Escrow could also be used for other purposes, such as allowing for key recovery, by the authorised keyholder, on appeal to the escrow authorities.

Given the risks and challenges of key loss in a PKI crypto context, these are options which might be worth considering.

For some reasons that gave me suspension that their encryption is not good anymore since the politicians encourage their staff to use it.

What software they were allowed to use before?

I'm sure they where allowed to use gpg.

Does this mean we can teach auditors to look beyond nist now too?

They should be banned from any and all encryption.

Who do they think they are?

What's good for the goose is good for the gander, as they say.

TL;DR Govt has a back door in Signal

Here's an instance where I approve of backdoor in encryption. You want a backdoor in encryption, government? Put it in your own fucking software. It's "by the people, for the people"; not "against the peasants, not the elites."

Backdoors are always a bad idea, because there is no way to guarantee that they'll only be used as intended.

OT: My recent "creepy" moment, with Signal.

Last year, I helped someone out, including dealing with their manipulative friend. Whose name and number ended up in my Android contacts db.

The other week, Signal pops a message: X has joined Signal. Be the first to send [them] a message.

Um...

You can disable these notifications in your settings.

The issue is not the notifications but the access that enabled them (which was apparently granted accidentally?)

Since you can send normal sms (to any contact on your phone) directly from Signal interface, I guess it should be obvious it has access to your contacts...

I no longer remember. Is that an explicit, prompted choice during installation?

If so, I probably wasn't overly worried. But now, seeing this... "unpleasant" person's name pop up, was a bit of a jolt.

Despite some prodding, none of my other contacts have switched over -- from Messenger or Whatsapp or whatever -- to Signal. So, I'm not... "used to" all its behavior, yet.

Yeah, I'm out here in the everyday boonies... ;-)

you're complaining because someone in your contacts ended up as a suggested friend in an app, after you granted the app access to your contacts?

Yeah, I don't know that I have the right to complain. Nonetheless, it was a "creepy" moment, for me.

Block them on Signal, its easy peasy! Their messages/calls will go to /dev/null while double checkmarking even!

Just because you have them in your contacts, doesn't mean they have you in theirs.

Also, IIRC Signal uses a hash of the phone number to display if one of your contacts is also using Signal. I understand how that notification might feel creepy at first, but if you understand what actually happens it de-escalates from "creepy" to merely "convenient".

I might choose to use Signal. I might prefer not to have that choice broadcast to all my contacts (well, all those who use Signal).

Yes, discoverability...

I'd rather have that explicitly opt-in, not a default behavior.

I view my use of Signal as information I'd prefer not to share with some -- even if they are in my contact db and even if they use Signal.

P.S. Yeah, I see some discrepancy between this and the way Signal is designed and the goal to minimize metadata.

Ok. Still, it was a creepy moment for me, seeing this person's name pop up in a Signal alert.

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