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Comment by johnnycab | Hacker News Reader

>Because our "leaders" are not smart enough to understand this, they've just been told it's bad.

Your comment is partially correct, it is the Home Secretaries, past and present, who have been routinely told by the civil servants to tow the anti-encryption line, which goes back to RIPA 2000 and even further back. In essence it is GCHQ who are asking and they understand encryption perfectly well; since they can't ask directly, hence the role falls upon the relevant minister in government to do it.

This will once again become a hot-button issue as outlined in the Queen's speech. The Tory Party is also switching from Whatsapp to Signal ─ make of that, what you will.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/10/former_gchq_wades_i...

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/17/tories-swit...

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Wee niggle: it's toe the line, meaning "take your position", no matter which of the several suggested etymological origins you favour (track and field, school or naval parades†, international border, bare-knuckle boxing, etc.).

† A parade is an assembly of some sort; it may or may not involve a march past or route march.

Thank you. It is too late to edit now.

Not the government, who was never using WhatsApp, the Tory Party.

Yes, you are correct. edited.

I'll read the link shortly but I thought they moved to signal because of leaks...from members of the group in questions. Not from someone hacking their handset or capturing and de-crypting messages in flight?

It will be hard to stop the leaks regardless of the platform, as screenshots are a common way to save and share conversations in this community. The reason provided by the Party, as stated in the article, suggests that it is due to group size limits. All other reasons for the switch are open to conjecture.

A Conservative spokesperson said the real justification for their MPs to use Signal was operational, rather than for security reasons. With so many Tory MPs elected at the last election, it had become impossible to fit them all in a single WhatsApp group, because they are currently capped at 256 members.

I think even that reason is BS to be honest: The tories won 317 seats in 2017. They "lost" about 10 people who were temporarily suspended from the party by Bojo. But I don't think they ever dropped below 256 MPs.

I wondered if telegram has some feature where you get an alert if someone screenshots the window (I seem to remember snap chat had this?). Do you know?

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