UK government MPs are using Signal’s automatic deletion feature | Hacker News Reader

UK government MPs are using Signal’s automatic deletion feature

private-eye.co.uk

227 pointssnthd117 comments

I’m in two minds about this. I think it’s pretty sleazy to be using signal to evade record keeping requirements. I also think it’s important to have transparency into things governments do.

But I also worry that such requirements can lead to worse results. Generally in a well run organisation, you want people to be able to speak their mind and disagree about things, but if the organisation makes a bad decision and those disagreements are recorded, they will be used against them.

For an arbitrary example, look at the Boeing 737 max. There were some internal emails claiming that the system which turned out not to be safe wasn’t safe (the problem with these was probably that they didn’t seem to make their way up to anyone who could change the decision), and probably the fallout from them will be worse than if there were no such emails and Boeing just appeared to not have considered the possibility of failure. This gives the message that one shouldn’t have these discussions through email because that gives the impression that known issues were ignored if they turn out to have mattered. But no one asked about the cases where people had raised concerns by email and they were corrected by redesigning things or where concerns were raised but deemed to not be significant and turned out not to be significant. It seems better to me for people to be able to voice disagreements.

Another example is in healthcare: I suspect people get worse outcomes because if anyone has a different (potentially better) opinion about how a patient may be treated, they are incentivised not to voice it because any disagreement in a hospitals records will make for a much stronger case in any litigation against a hospital.

Perhaps the issue is that the media or public inquiries (or maybe courts or juries) will look at any such record as a sign of negligence rather than an ordinary thing which happens all the time in cases that go wrong and right.

But maybe signal is really being used for political scheming and some public business overflows onto signal unintentionally.

The issue is that UK politicians have themselves decided to evade rather than going through the legal, public process of allowing this to happen.

Even if you agree that some privacy in communications must be preserved, they didn’t do that through a process a part of which they themselves are.

> For an arbitrary example, look at the Boeing 737 max. There were some internal emails claiming that the system which turned out not to be safe wasn’t safe (the problem with these was probably that they didn’t seem to make their way up to anyone who could change the decision), and probably the fallout from them will be worse than if there were no such emails and Boeing just appeared to not have considered the possibility of failure. This gives the message that one shouldn’t have these discussions through email because that gives the impression that known issues were ignored if they turn out to have mattered. But no one asked about the cases where people had raised concerns by email and they were corrected by redesigning things or where concerns were raised but deemed to not be significant and turned out not to be significant. It seems better to me for people to be able to voice disagreements.

I'm sorry, but what?! The fallout of the 737 max debacle is that the senior people didn't listen when the engineers raised concerns about safety. This is a solid example of why comms _should_ be recorded, and wholly _not_ the example of why they should not.

The guy at Boeing who couldn’t raise concerns about safety is currently under criminal investigation. The chilling effect comes from your joke about something at work becoming a punishable event. No one is blaming the single engineer for the MCAS problem but that didn’t stop him from requiring a lawyer

"Should" for us, yes. But consider the perspective of the company—and specifically its lawyers; their takeaway may be "This stuff being in writing made things worse in court, therefore we'll instruct our employees not to put this stuff in writing."

Though I would guess that having an explicit policy of "don't write down any safety concerns" would do badly in court as well. I suspect any real such policy would have to be unwritten, or a not-very-explicit side effect of something that seemed relatively benign.

That’s already known. It’s why mingling at golf clubs and galas and charity events is important and why clustering in cities is useful. Generally, you can trust conversations you have in person to not be recorded and maintain plausible deniability.

Many companies and worse, public institutions around the world are moving to solidify the destruction of evidence with data retention policies. They may automatically delete any email older than 1 or 2 years, every instant message sent via corporate channels in 30 days, etc. as a "disk-space saving measure". Including backups! Anyone can see through that explanation since any CIO claiming cost savings come from the few tens of GB of archived Office Communicator chats should be politely invited behind the barn for a dramatic reenactment of an age old saying.

Scandals like Boeing's and others that shook trust in public institutions, most of which are required by law to make any such material available to citizens, just convinced them that proactive destruction of evidence is the way to go. This is not punishable by law. And when the requests for data do come in all the have to do is delay the process until the totally legitimate automatic policy kicks in and removes the last shred of evidence.

At this point only whistle blowers diligently collecting all the data before it's destroyed could still help in any way but this comes at great personal risk. And when tools like Signal are involved good luck with that, one would have to be part of every conversation.

In my experience, unwritten policies absolutely exist in major multinational corporations.

Verba volant, scripta manent. Ancient Latins already knew the score. A lot of people initially refused to use emails in the ‘90s because they (rightly) perceived it as something written down and hence likely to be used to hold them to account - only people who grew up with IM have a more “disposable” view of electronic text.

I can assure you that any manager or owner on the planet, at some point or another, has a conversation where it is agreed that something will never be written down in any form.

Similarly, I have several friends working on wall street who flat out refuse to discuss anything related to a stock over email. Every discussion with them no matter how trivial is on the phone.

No paper trail, no investigation.

Don't phone, fax, and snail mail have more legal protections than email and other new communication methods as well?

It might be a good demonstration of that if the engineers had spotted the safety problem. As far as anyone can tell, they didn't - the press took some internal e-mails worrying about other safety problems which turned out not to actually matter, spun them as proof that their employees knew that the 737 Max was unsafe, and confused people like the commented you're replying to into thinking the problem was actually spotted internally. To give some idea about how overblown this was, the really juicy-sounding email comments were about problems with the simulator, not the actual plane. The fact that Boeing had a culture where people could speak their mind and those comments were recorded left us all less informed.

More generally: anything that is made public, will be politicised.

I agree that it's a fair concern. Another recent example: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jul/07/foreign-off...

The logical conclusion of that is secret government - perfectly "apolitical", but impossible to question or participate in.

No, that is not the logical conclusion. There are still great advantages to open government, but what I said remains true.

Consider the incident with the British ambassador to the US, that I linked above. The ambassador's job was to evaluate the Trump presidency. His conclusions were damning, and when the document leaked, there were predictable political consequences. If such reports are made open as a matter of policy, they become worthless, as they can no longer be plainly honest.

Everything is politicized at the moment. It reminds me of the scene in VEEP where the politicians have to eat with their hands because “utensils are too political.” It’s absurd but I think it’s a symptom of larger issues and avoiding transparency won’t stop the divisive politics.

British government has transparency problem at much higher level. There is official report from investigation of rape gangs. It includes almost 100k child rape victims in many cities over 3 decades. Government refuses to release it, and pretends this abuse does not exists.

Do you have a source on the 100k figure?

No, that is an estimate from forum thread compiled from many articles. Wikipedia claims 1400 victims just in Rotherham.

For anyone wondering what this is about, see Rotherham investigation[0]. It’s a fairly damning read.

I can’t remember the figures as far victim counts (read this a long time ago and am not eager for a refresher), any number would be too big frankly.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...

It is a very damning read. Quoting just one part

"... had been sexually abused in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013 by predominantly British-Pakistani men. ... The failure to address the abuse was attributed to a combination of factors revolving around race, class and gender—contemptuous and sexist attitudes toward the mostly working-class victims; fear that the perpetrators' ethnicity would trigger allegations of racism and damage community relations; the Labour council's reluctance to challenge a Labour-voting ethnic minority; lack of a child-centred focus;"

So the council didn't take any action to avoid "allegations of racism and damage community relations". This makes no sense. What did the council think will happen when the news breaks out. Won't it increase racial bias by leaps and bounds. And to just avoid the allegations of racism, the council was willing to let this continue? How do such people sleep at night.

It's a very sad and horribly managed situation in the name of supposedly good intentions. However, the facts and details have been drummed up over the years by Murdoch-owned media, and the statistics used to "prove" the extent of the abuse, and its attribution to "Asian men" has been criticized as not only unscientific but pseudoscientific. There's a good overview of the history of the case, its media attention, and journalistic standards, by Cockbain and Tufail, two academic criminologists, here[0]. Not only that, but some of the victims themselves have spoken out about being used as playing chips for right-wing rhetoric in Rotherham (as noted in the paper).

>Javid’s response to Champion was scooped by The Times’ aforementioned Andrew Norfolk and reported as the home secretary having ‘ordered research into why men convicted of grooming-gang sex crimes are disproportionately of Pakistani origin’.44 Although this angle misrepresented Javid’s actual letter, it was repeated across numerous news outlets – and neither Javid nor Champion apparently cared to correct it.45 Consequently, the impression stood that ethnic disproportionality in ‘grooming gangs’ was an accepted fact and legitimate focus for government-commissioned research.

And rather importantly:

>Although criminal justice data on ethnicity should always be treated cautiously (and data on religion are simply not collected as standard), Asians were notably not overrepresented among the approximately 172,000 men and 27,000 women convicted of sexual offences in England and Wales in 2016.

[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03063968198957...

We have a media who will not give anyone the benefit of the doubt and actively seek to take sentences out of context to whip up controversy and get a few more clicks from the baying public.

I fully agree about transparency in government, but it was the public that decided that candid conversations were fair game for attacking not just politicians and officials, but anyone.

There are at least partial solutions such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_House_Rule but they rely on the good faith of the attendees, that's not something you can take for granted when tabloid journalists are present.

Also in two minds, having worked in the civil service before. There was a slight panic when it became understood that unpaid Slack didn’t actually delete messages beyond the latest 10k; as soon as you started paying they’d all be available. Not that there was anything definitively problematic, but it just would take one newspaper to request “all Slack messages from the day before the brexit vote” and suddenly there’d be problems with the public’s perception of civil service political neutrality.

Because to be honest, everyone is political in some form or another, especially the people that effectively take a pay cut to work in the civil service because they want to help citizens, and it’s a daily challenge to keep that political nature from spilling out into your work.

Everyone needs a place to unburden, and if you’re legally forbidden from doing that with friends and family you rely on the workplace. In the end the best I could do was make a FOIA reaction emoji to remind people to tone it down if something could be perceived in the wrong way by the press.

I think there's also a fundamental misunderstanding on how many of these organizations work.

When I worked with the Feds (DOJ), we documented out many "what if" or contingency scenarios. They ranged from "effectively impossible" to "absolutely happening" on one axis and irrelevant to omgwtf on another. My terminology, not official ;) But we were encouraged to explore situations and scenarios and think out the likelihood, implications, relevant existing policies, potential responses under those policies, what new policies would make sense, etc. For the most part, these are creative/exploration exercises but sometimes they're deadly serious and will drive policy going forward. You don't always know at the time.

Fast forward 5, 10 or 20 years and something similar happens. Suddenly someone who happens to remember the report or get creative searching archives screams "OMG! THERE WAS A REPORT YEARS AGO AND NO ONE LISTENED!"

Correct.. but it was never a proposal/plan, just an evaluation.

Unfortunately, understanding all of that requires nuance and perspective that doesn't fit in a headline and will be buried in policy wonk discussions. I suspect if you expose all of that and give it as much attention/credibility as fully baked proposals and policies, it will chill honest, internal assessments and debate.

> But I also worry that such requirements can lead to worse results. Generally in a well run organisation, you want people to be able to speak their mind and disagree about things, but if the organisation makes a bad decision and those disagreements are recorded, they will be used against them.

There's an existing mechanism in Parliamentary systems: cabinet confidentiality. All papers, records, minutes etc associated with the cabinet are held in high secrecy until a long period of time has passed. Australia holds them for 30 years unless they are otherwise active records.

It does as you say: allows ministers to talk openly amongst themselves in the highest governing body. So long as leaks are rare, it's an effective mechanism.

The real solution is to dilute political power further not by eliminating it but expanding it.

There’s game theory to back up the idea of a balancing act by making everyone police.

Personally I’d prefer expansion of representatives (in the US, but it’s not too hard to translate to UK) and/or judiciary.

In the case of the judiciary, technology could be applied transparently via open source models of building case management, looking for patterns, weighting their correctness by social means....

But of course we’ll keep wanking memes from ancient history

The source of the leaked communications would be another MP, as presumably no one else would have access. That means enforcing such a rule would create a parliamentary privilege debacle.

And since this is a non-recorded communication, about non-secret matters, how do determine if anyone actually broke the rule or not? There will never be evidence to back up an accusation, unless someone admits to it for some reason.

Some points to consider:

- From the article: “Starting in late 2004, before the FOIA came into force in early 2005, Downing Street implemented an automatic 90-day deletion of emails aside from those specifically selected by civil servants as relevant for storage in the National Archives”

- Since the invention of the telephone, it's never been an expectation that transcripts of telephone calls between MPs or officials should be recorded and made available under FOI.

- Indeed, it's never been an expectation that private face-to-face conversations between MPs/officials be recorded and made available under FOI.

- At least according to FOI laws I'm vaguely familiar with (in Australia), an FOI request can only be made for an item of information that is known to exist. People can't go on "fishing expeditions" for, say, all communications between nominated people over a nominated period of time. Thus, if UK FOI is similarly constrained, it's usually going to be unlikely a private messaging app conversation could be sought under FOI anyway.

All that considered, I don't think this is that big a deal.

> At least according to FOI laws I'm vaguely familiar with (in Australia), an FOI request can only be made for an item of information that is known to exist. People can't go on "fishing expeditions" for, say, all communications between nominated people over a nominated period of time.

Interestingly I don't think this is 100% true - under (for example) the federal FOI Act I think a request framed as asking for "email sent on government systems between Alice and Bob in the last six months" would be facially valid, if Alice and Bob were civil servants (although of course exemptions may apply to individual emails).

Here's an (Australian) FOI request that is similar in spirit to your example:

https://www.righttoknow.org.au/request/philip_gaetjens_the_l...

which asks for "any emails contained in all of Philip Gaetjens’ outlook items (including deleted items) that contain any of the following terms (in the body of an email and/or in the addressee fields of an email): “liberal.org.au” or “ipa.org.au”", and the department deemed that a valid request. (Philip Gaetjens is a senior civil servant, the Liberals are a political party and the IPA is a right-leaning think tank; it's reasonable to infer that the fishing here is for evidence of a link between the civil service and a particular side of politics.)

Thanks for expanding on that (I avoided digging into it for brevity and as I was time-constrained).

That aligns with my understanding, that there must be an explicit piece of information you’re looking for or occurrence you’re looking for evidence of, rather than just seeking to dragnet-fish all correspondence to see what’s there.

Anyway, it makes sense to me that messenger app conversations are considered ephemeral like phonecalls and can just naturally disappear, whereas more formal material like meeting minutes, official written correspondence, contracts and public service documents are kept on record and made subject to FOI.

In the Netherlands (probably more similar laws compared to the UK due to EU influence) you can make a request for all written communications regarding a specific decision by a government agency. That would include the emails about it.

I think it's rather sleazy of the UK government to implement a 90 day removal procedure, knowing that they can delay answering a request for longer than that. Totally not in the spirit of the FOI laws.

UK FOI isn't constrained by that. The responding party use specific exemptions if something doesn't exist, so you can effectively do fishing expeditions as long as the request isn't excessively burdensome, etc.

It's really not the same to equate using a medium that is standard and normally does not record and using a non-standard medium and also explicitly choosing to not log conversations. The explicit choice can mean a world of difference.

That doesn’t seem reasonable to me. People will communicate via the most expedient means available. The telephone wasn’t “standard” until suddenly it was. Signal’s use is widespread, and people choose it because it has been designed to be very secure and private. The auto-deletion of messages is a key part of that security and privacy. It seems reasonable that politicians are entitled to use secure and private online communications, just as all other citizens are, and just as they always have via phone and spoken conversation.

I had a buddy a couple years ago who was a low level FOIA officer in the U.S. military. He was telling me that shortly after the Clinton email scandal there was a policy pushed on all his branch's computers that forced encryption to be turned on for all users.

What that resulted in was basically a complete shutdown of email discovery for fulfilling FOIA requests. You go into Outlook, do a search, and if it's not in the subject line of the email then it's simply not found.

He told the story as if it was a conspiracy against FOIA, but based on my experience of dealing with bureaucracies, it was more likely just coincidence.

Never attribute to malice what could be explained with incompetence.

Incompetence is what leads to doing nothing and scandals continuing to happen because people have access to information that exposes hypocrisy and wrongdoing that offends them. As this was a reaction to a scandal I'm going to say your buddy was on track, it was done intentionally in order to frustrate future discovery. (Not solely a conspiracy against FOIA particularly but that is one method used to reveal information)

It was done near a scandal, but not necessarily in reaction to one. Correlation is not causation.

Does anything, anything happen in politics that isn't in reaction to a causation?

Newton's third law confirms that yes, everything in politics occurs in reaction to some other causation.

However correlating two items together based on timestamp alone is not enough to validate causation.

For those unfamiliar, Private Eve is an excellent magazine with a long history. It takes a humourous but serious investgative look at UK politics, business etc looking at eg corruption and double standards. With cartoons and iconic front page puns.

And for the large part it avoided the pitfalls of moving online. Current issue: https://www.private-eye.co.uk/current-issue

Private Eye avoided the paywall problem by not putting itself online at all, it only publishes selected articles online to leave you hungry for the rest :)

It also avoided becoming accessible to the blind and other parts of the population who cannot read print.

This is a good point, accessibility is very important and it's a shame you've been downvoted.

Private Eye is available in audio form through the RNIB, though it may just be a digest version as it looks like it's part of a weekly compilation from various publications.

https://www.rnib.org.uk/daisy-magazines

I think RNIB do an audio read version

A print subscription is £34 a year, delivered (in the U.K.). It’s ridiculously good value.

So good in fact that the managing editor is usually the most sued person in the UK.

Ian Hislop is a national treasure and his evidence to the select committee on press intrusion was both erudite and hilarious.

His TV panel show, "Have I Got News For You" is also wonderful. Just comedians, discussing and making jokes about the news, for something like 25 years now. And most of it is on YouTube.

Our PM was also a regular.

To be clear he didn't create the show, he's one of its stars.

The show was a successful transition to television of the Radio 4 classic, "The News Quiz"

I've never paired them, curiously.

The News Quiz is still a R4 show so transition would perhaps be the wrong word. Extension, assuming they have the same source as you imply with your comment.

Indeed, I love The News Quiz though I still miss Sandy, the new host is great but not a match.

Angus Dayton used to host that show

He couldn’t keep it in his pants, so was ridiculed by the guests (including Hislop)

That led to him resigning

Which led to Boris Johnson hosting a few episodes

A charismatic buffoon, that catapulted him to wider attention

He was then selected for London mayor

During the 2012 Olympics he was pushed further into the world’s eye

That led to him being a key role one way or another in brexit. He flipped a coin and backed Leave.

That backing tipped the scales and road to leave

That eventually led to him becoming PM, after a lucky backstabbing by Gove in 2017, meaning he managed to get a large majority in 2019

It’s an interesting example of the butterfly effect.

I think it was Dayton's drug use that caused the initial situation.

Possibly, such a long time ago.

The tactics that won brexit with vote leave were used later to elect trump.

It amuses me to think how the world can change from tiny changes

"I just cut a fat Czech a fat cheque"

It has consistently had (IMHO) the best pandemic coverage of any media. The MD section is brilliant, challenging and thought provoking... and it's a satirical magazine!

(this says a lot about the poor state of media in general).

I strongly urge UK-base HNers to subscribe. It is one of the few national publications still doing proper long-term investigative journalism into local government (in a way that local papers haven’t had the resources to do for years) and usually signals important stories before the main papers pick them up, especially wrt stories about the rest of the news media. Many people stuck in large media orgs leak to the Eye so they can report that e.g. the Telegraph hasn’t been allowed to report on something that might damage the financial interests of its owners.

And it’s quite funny.

Agreed. I think their level of investigation is peerless. They go where others fear to tread. They ruffle more feathers in every single edition than the FT does in a year.

I can't think of any other UK publication that comes close.

It's an overall excellent and very dense UK-specific read (~40 pages of editorial, cartoons and letters every fortnight). Several stories broken by Private Eye have ended up featuring on Hacker News much later too such as Horizon - an IT system for the UK's Post Office which somehow executives managed to persuade the courts was infallible, so if a bug in Horizon said your Post Office ought to have £10k of cash that it didn't you (the "Postmaster" of that office, typically a small local store owner making a little bit of extra money offering this vital service) might literally go to prison for stealing this money that never even existed.

It does have its own unique culture you'd need to spin up on to really grok what's going on. For example it just calls the Queen "Brenda", and various government agencies get more apposite names like the "Fundamentally Supine Agency". And there are a lot of running jokes after existing for so long.

It's basically what the press looks like when they are doing their job. They are privately owned and on a mission to tell the truth, not to make as much money as possible.

Hislop and before him Cook are actual real people trying to do something good instead of just attempting to get rich for the sake of it before dropping dead.

There are lots of in jokes and also "code phrases", such as "tired and emotional" == drunk, more here [1].

I used to subscribe to it but cancelled it after I left the UK.

The UK press are an absolute disaster. Most are partisan, including:

Telegraph: torygraph Daily mail: torygraph FT: bankers times Guardian: with you until you need actual help then it's back to mi5 Sun/Times: Murdoch incorporated

Private eye is literally carry everything on their shoulders. There is nothing else.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurring_themes_and_in-jokes_...

Private Eye has also created one of the best legal responses that they cite now and again. In the case of Arkell v. Pressdram.

If you're curious about it details are on Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Eye#Litigation

Private Eye is very good, but they don't always get it right.

> Even when an error does not end up in the law courts, it can still prove embarrassing. The magazine was at the forefront of challenging the MMR triple vaccine - devoting a special-edition pamphlet to the subject. A defiant Hislop insists that the Eye was right to raise the questions it did and to defend the reputation of Andrew Wakefield, the controversial doctor who first suggested there might be a link between MMR, autism and bowel disease - a theory ruled out by the latest comprehensive review of evidence. "There's nothing there that I don't think is right. We came into the story about the hounding of Wakefield and the idea that he wasn't a bona fide doctor, who'd done a huge amount of good looking after these children - the parents certainly bear witness to that. All his stuff beforehand was peer-reviewed and no one said, 'This man's a lunatic' about the link between bowel disease and autism. The work he's still doing is still perfectly OK. I don't accept the claim, 'You added to a climate of hysteria, which means herd immunity will go down and therefore it's all your fault.' I think the questions we asked at the time were acceptable to ask."

That leaflet was published in 2002, when the science was pretty clear. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1123186/

Tangentially, the UK government digital service (and made available to the wider civil service) uses the free tier version of Slack which retains but disallows access to historic messages.

FOI in this case (in lieu of anybody coughing up the licences) relies on regular manual exports and their secure archiving.

This isn't afaik an attempt to avoid accountability (in fact it's the opposite), just a good faith use of free software to enable cross department communication in the absence of a service from a high level mandated corporate partner.

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/450423927/ICO-highlights...

> Slack [...] just a good faith use of free software [...]

Since when is Slack free software?

It sounds like you are conflating free software and Free software.

I don't think capitalization matters:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software

In addition to not being free, Slack is also not software. It's a service.

Sure, there's some software involved in making that service tick (mostly proprietary), as well as some limited gratis access ("free tier") being offered, but that doesn't magically transform that service into "free software".

Which I clearly referred to with "free tier version of Slack". What's the complaint here?

Update: you've edited the parent since I responded to it. Your original comment was something like "it's not free, part of it is free"

Still no idea what you're moaning about tho...

> "it's not free, part of it is free"

That's news to me. Which part of Slack do you consider to be free software? Is that the part you think GDS is using?

See my original comment.

I think "freeware" is a clearer term, vs. the overloaded "free software".

In this scenario, how is this all defined?

Slack can be a product, software, service. Depending on which angle you look at it.

A reasonable person would assume "without cost" until proven otherwise when reading "free software".

Free Software Foundation appear to disagree with your definition [1], while OED lists absence of monetary charge as only one of necessary characteristics of "free software" [2]

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

[2] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/free-sof...

I don't care and it doesn't matter what the FSF thinks, it's human language and they can't dictate how that works.

I'd assumed that the main difference between the capitalised version and uncapitalised version was being potentially able to trademark the former, so you could get the distinction in free-ness that way. I'm not aware of the FSF actually trademarking the term though, so I could well be wrong on that point.

For those not following the topic, among others, the UK, EU, US - all officially endorsed the use of Signal for official government use.

Do you have a link for that? I often get ask questions about secure messaging, and I always have a hard time giving anything better than "it depends".

——————————

UK example reference: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/12/20/uk_conservatives_br...

——————————

EU example reference: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/24/21150918/european-commiss...

——————————

US example drafted by NSA: https://media.defense.gov/2020/Apr/24/2002288652/-1/-1/0/CSI...

* Note this document is for public release. If you dig around you will find references to deploy US Special Forces even using Signal for official communications within combat zones.

——————————

Thanks a lot.

>US Special Forces even using Signal for official communications within combat zones //

Do they have some other systems for using Signal on, they can't use it on regular mobile phones without being tracked by base-stations, surely?

While voting to ban normal people from using any form of encryption in any form...

It’s “funny” how the U.K. government endorse signal for covering their tracks but want backdoors put in because other people can’t be trusted.

Furthermore, it should be illegal for governments to use self-destructing messages.

Not surprising really: People do tend to assume others will act like themselves would in the same situation.

Government secrecy should be absolutely restricted by the general public - it is the beginning of all corruption of government. The UK headed down the wrong path towards totalitarian class-ist society when it decided the common people shouldn't know their own governments' secrets.

When the government passed laws authorising itself to snoop on all Internet traffic, some MPs asked if there couldn't be an exception for them, since after all certainly they aren't terrorists or paedophiles...

The response (IIRC from Theresa May who was Home Secretary at the time) was that this would be technically impossible.

The reason of course is that although the law is written in a way that suggests the letter authorising interception looks like "Dear Tiny ISP, you are required to store all the data about Bill The Terrorist so we can investigate very important crimes, love, the Home Secretary XX" the actual letters go like this: "Dear 10Tb/s Internet interchange, you are required to store literally everything, so that we can investigate whatever we want, love, the Home Secretary XX".

You could easily never issue letters requesting data for an individual MP, but if you never even intended to name individuals anyway then that's obviously not going to work...

> if the records have already been deleted, or indeed are automatically deleted after the request is made, no crime is committed

This isn’t true under US law. No matter where you conduct your work, if you destroy a record without capturing it as required by your records schedule, you have violated the law, whether there is a FOIA request or not. It is your responsibility to migrate record material to an appropriate location.

If you conduct official business on any of these platforms with auto-destruct that seems suspect to me and cause for some sort of censure, just like a stock trading floor doing this would be in breach of regulation.

Oddly, all the internal party shenanigans seem to be done over Whatsapp still - but the main threat there is leaking from the recipients.

And this particular government seems particularly untrustworthy at a particularly difficult time.

I can’t help but laugh a sad laugh. I oppose government monitoring and support transparency. And I support Signal to avoid monitoring and now it’s used to remove transparency.

I can’t get my friends to install Signal because they say they have nothing to hide from their government and now the same government is using Signal to hide from my friends.

Moxie should add it to the advertising blurb:” We’re so secure the British government use Signal to hide from its citizens.”

Re: trying to get friends to install Signal Been there, but <rant>it got even harder as Signal makes it mandatory to set a PIN now which cannot be skipped, all because of future 'cloud backup' feature. It kinda stinks to me, as Signal bragged about not keeping almost any metadata, and now they want to keep backups. Whats worse, it seems there is no opt-out.<rant/>

Makes it hard to recommend Signal now.

As a Signal user, what do you think about Signal's recent development?

I’ve not followed them too much but trust Moxie since his previous decision were good.

I think Signal is trying to gain more mainstream adoption and it will need backups for that. The pin is annoying but if it gives the app secure backups then I guess it’s a good idea. Although I agree having an opt-out would be good (but I expect most people want backups)

Please change the title here, the article posits that MPs may be using disappearing messages, but does not make any claims they are doing so.

How different is this from previous use of phone calls? I guess they can have many participants and stretch over much longer periods of time.

I think they ought to legislate this into normality. The alternative is to make it mandatory to note all conversations with colleagues for the public record, however trivial, which is obviously absurd. An IM conversation is a personal conversation, treating it any other way will stifle the effective function of government.

It's not a personal conversation if you're working for the government and talking about topics that pertain to government functions. You have no right to privacy in the same way that your average citizen (should) be when your decisions affect the lives of millions. There needs to be a paper trail or power becomes even more opaque than it already is and all accountability goes out the window. There can be no democracy if your government can hide everything they do. The records don't necessarily need to always be public, but they do need to be stored so FOI requests can be served when necessary.

Okay, so you believe that all conversations between lawmakers of any sort ought to be recorded?

Obviously, yes. Nixon would never have been impeached without the tapes. If there's no record, there's no accountability. That's just how it is.

While we are at it lets also mandate that all work-related communications you make are similarly archived. There is a long history of corporate malfeasance leading to catastrophic outcomes for the general public and we need to make sure that people like you are held accountable when your failures and bad decisions lead to poor outcomes. I am sure you will agree that without good record-keeping a lack of accountability for your actions is bound to lead to disaster. We will also expect a written transcript of all work conversations, no matter how innocuous you might think them to be, within 48 hours of the conversation. Thanks!

This is what I'm getting at. The reductio ad absurdam is indeed absurd.

We don't only want accountability, we also want good decisions, and good advice, even on delicate topics. IMO this is quite a difficult topic.

Suppose you are concerned that some variants of a policy you're thinking about may be legal or illegal. There is a pretty large gray area. You could corner the relevant legal mind after lunch, and ask his opinion. Then there is no recording, only your memory.

Or you could email him, and get a more considered opinion. This is likely to lead to better policies. But perhaps some of the options you're considering are a bit controversial, and stating bluntly what you really mean (and what you are concerned about) is risky if your email may be subject to a FOI request. So perhaps you re-write it very carefully avoiding the worst options, or perhaps you run it past the PR people before emailing, or perhaps you give up and ask in the pub instead. These all seem like worse outcomes, and ones we should be careful not to encourage.

I'm sorry, but if you require the deletion of what you said to protect yourself from the people, then you shouldn't be in a position of power.

> and stating bluntly what you really mean (and what you are concerned about)

In the end, people aren't judged for this. They're judged for the actions that they take, and then communications like this are used for context. If your decision is so bad that they had to make a FOI request to find out how spurious your reasoning was, then I don't see why you should have the protection of having no paper trail. That's insanity.

> They're judged for the actions that they take

I wish that were true, but it more often seems they're judged by the worst dirt that can be made to stick. And they know it.

I'm sorry, but if you require the deletion of what you said to protect yourself from the people, then you shouldn't be in a position of power.

In reality if a politician makes a genuine error or prediction that turns out to be wrong he will face demands that he resigns for deliberately misleading the public. The media have created this toxic environment where normal debate and discourse is impossible

The media used does does not affect the privacy/non-privacy of the discussion in any way.

But it does. There's no expectation on politicians to record and publish their face-to-face one-on-one conversations.

There should be such an expectation, though.

Can I gently bring the discussion back to the point. Usually argument defence in the internet seems to diverge.

The issue: Using Signal to to evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Government officials are legally required to keep records of decision making and discussions made in official capacity. If they use discussions over Signal to make decisions, they should write memos and archive them. Just because the media they use is not doing it for the does not relieve them from the duty.

I disagree entirely. Government must be conducted openly and with critical review by the people being governed, always. All government business should be logged and available for audit for years after the fact.

Otherwise, what we get is a totalitarian class society divided between 'those that know the secrets' and 'those that do not'.

So all conversations between politicians ought to be recorded. What about all conversation between government employees?

Yes. If you are performing a public duty, it must be done in open society. Anything less is corrupt by definition.

Secret meetings are the opposite of open society.

Complete recording of every conversation leads to transparency along with atrocious decisions, due to groupthink among other things.

It's a most unfortunate dilemma, but it's a strong, well-documented phenomenon and you can't wish it away.

An example of groupthink:

I've been in a room, chairing a meeting, where everyone agreed on a definite course of action. Full consensus (except me).

When I asked each person after the meeting what they personally wanted, literally 100% of them disagreed with the decision they had affirmatively consented to. The actual decision was something nobody wanted. The option was only even brought up because people believed (wrongly) that other people would want it.

All of them "went along" with what they believed was the view of others in the room. They wanted lower friction; nobody wanted problems from dissenting (which includes time wasted in meetings due to believing there are different views to reconcile, even when that isn't actually true).

Unfortunately all guessed incorrectly what the view of others was, then went along with their guess.

When it's a big decision, it's tragic when that happens. Public duty has a lot of those.

When performing public duty, you must have transparency, and avoid corruption, but you also must have intelligent group information sharing, reasoning and decisions.

But you can't have them all. Wishing won't make it so. Choose your poison.

Or better, choose a multi-layered system with well-placed compromises to get both intelligence and transparency in some measure, in whatever arrangement provides best results.

I like what the Chatham House Rule wikipedia page says on this:

> It is designed to reduce the risk of what has come to be described as groupthink, where unpopular views are excluded from discussion, reducing the range of opinions an organisation can discuss.

With regards to corruption, one theory is that you need enough transparency that corruption cannot thrive; beyond that you get diminishing returns along with negative consequences in other areas. For a manufacturing analogy to corruption: To perform quality assurance that a batch of components is good, you don't need to measure every component, you only need to measure a random subset, chosen by the tester.

Isn't this better than them using whatsapp and having everything they write read by a foreign government?

At least someone has some technical knowledge. Was a bit worried about them after their zoom screenshot debacle.

It’s okay, the leopards would never eat _my_ face

Forcefully deleting stuff from my device is super annoying and I'll fight that to the bitter end.

Yes, software that forcefully deletes received messages from recipient device is software acting against intent and will of its user (recipient). We have one word for such software - malware.

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