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Comment by mvid | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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...

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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

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

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