UK Politicos Brexit from Whatsapp to Signal | Hacker News Reader

UK Politicos Brexit from Whatsapp to Signal

theregister.co.uk

46 pointsgnufx12 comments

TFA says:

> The switch to Signal will also allow the Conservative party to stem the flow of leaks emerging from its inner circle.

How will it do that?

> Like WhatsApp, Signal has end-to-end encryption baked in, preventing a foreign power or individual from accessing sensitive conversations. In addition, it also includes settings, which, when enabled, self-destructs messages after a period of time.

> Unfortunately, Signal doesn't allow group moderators to block individuals from taking screenshots, which would frustrate the process of leaking a conversation to the press.

But if you look at the Buzzfeed stories referred to, they are based on insider leaks of Whatsapp traffic, often in the form of screenshotted group messages.

So while it's good for the Reg to poke fun at the implied encryption hypocrisy, they do their readers a disservice by not highlighting the discrepancy between the claimed cure and the actual disease.

In fact framing the Buzzfeed "whatsapp leak" stories as a security exploit issue is downright misleading.

If you look a little closer, they are all authored by ex-Breitbart journalist Alex Wickham and seem to have dried up around the time the previous PM Theresa May resigned. I think there's an obvious inference, which I will leave to the reader ;)

TFA does not state that Signal is more secure than WhatsApp.

They're switching to Signal because WhatsApp has a hard cap of 250 members per group, while Signal's group size is unlimited.

With the Conservative Party's recent election win, they now must communicate with much larger groups. If WhatsApp isn't an option, then Signal is certainly better able to "stem the flow of leaks" than alternatives like email or Slack.

Naturally, none of these prevent screenshots, so that's irrelevant.

A direct quote:

> The switch to Signal will also allow the Conservative party to stem the flow of leaks emerging from its inner circle.

which implies there's some security advantage over whatsapp (viz. the word "also".) But no evidence is provided to that effect.

And none of these things will prevent a camera, or someone else with a phone's camera. It's funny for anyone to insinuate a group of 250+ will ever be safe from leaking information.

I know we hate government IT contracts, but why isn't there a requirement to use something that saves a paper trail.

Indeed, apparently the real reason they switched was so that they can have conversations bigger than WhatsApp's limit of 256 people. Good luck preventing leaks from a group that size!

> Unfortunately, Signal doesn't allow group moderators to block individuals from taking screenshots, which would frustrate the process of leaking a conversation to the press.

Right, because there are unfortunately no longer any journalists with cameras anymore.

Given their views on encryption, it would be remarkable if they led by example and switched to an unencrypted platform instead.

One of the tricky parts about the shift to Signal or e2e in general for politicians is the data retention FOIA problem. It's not really an issue for parties but is when government business slips into the inevitable conversation at some point. With some of the people we work with they've found themselves having to screenshot and send hundreds of messages.

It's one of the reasons why I think Matrix is going to become more popular for low level government conversations. As it is recently in France. As far as I understand they have managed to solve this problem when deployed in such environments.

This is good. Obviously it won't do anything to stop leaks (that's an unsolvable analog hole called "humans"), but it will help evangelising Signal ("if it's good enough for the scheming knaves in power..."), which provides superior privacy to the average person than Whatsapp or Telegram.

Easy to blame tech for leaks when it was a human -- one of their own -- who has been leaking this information. I look forward to hearing of Brexit Signal leaks.

that’s just good opsec, frankly.

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