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Comment by cies | Hacker News Reader

I'm happy to see this. I came out embarrassingly that Germany was spied on by the "ally" US. They already did not trust MS Exchange, probably for good reasons. So they either trust the Swiss (Signal), the Russians (Telegram, prolly not), the ..., or they roll their own, or they use open source. I'm stoked to see they seem (yes: seem) to be doing the latter.

Why do I emphasize "seem". Well there have been several German initiatives for using open source, but non of them stuck very well. Munich's going Linux comes to mind, but there were others. And I'm afraid that this may be another such "attempt", while I hope it this time different as their national security is a at stake.

Telling everyone to communicate with GPG-encrypted emails has shown to be too hard on users, who then simply use one of the many less-secure channels. You have to do something, or you know they --the US mostly (WhatsApp, Twitter, GMail/Chat) -- will listen along with everything.

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I don't know why the person who was first to respond to you is "dead" but set aside his value judgement; all he wrote is factually correct. The embarrassment you speak of lies in the fact that it became public knowledge, not in the act itself, depending on the perspective of specific institutions. Furthermore, disregarding the fact that signal is in Israeli hands, i'm fairly certain they don't even trust themselves and simply calculate and spread risks as they see fit. Regarding your Munich example, the most significant factors for the outcome of that debacle where at one end incompetent people backed by powerless competent people and on the other end Microsoft with millions of lobby money backed by a powerful state actor. Both can easily be regarded as both a risk and opportunity for state security. Your closing statement is of course indisputable, never the less we should not forget that despite the fact that times change; old adagia such as "Something you have, something you are, something you know" are not only easily understood by everyone but we are also getting there with for example the advent of cheap FIDO2 keys, fairly invisible network access control & encryption at device enrollment, infrared cameras, privacy respecting / agnostic AI driven real-time analytics & heuristics at scale and so on. In other words, we are slowly getting there but not due things such as "having a BundesMessenger" unless it's weaknesses contribute to the drive for improvement ~ including replacing American cloud services ~ ; something it's open source nature definitely does.

> [The] Munich example, the most significant factors for the outcome of that debacle where at one end incompetent people backed by powerless competent people and on the other end Microsoft with millions of lobby money backed by a powerful state actor.

How is that different when it comes to Matrix/Elements vs proprietary apps? Maybe this time there's not so much lobbying and more "user just choosing a different communication channel" than they are told to use (as it's UX is so much worse).

>the Russians (Telegram, prolly not)

I wouldn't call it a "Russian" system. Just consider where Durov currently resides and has his wealth.

The power of any State regarding such things usually works by exercising control & influence over entire networks of people. Not so much by brute (legal) force applied at who or whatever holds the formal power. Quite often, such firms / owners / networks of people don't even fully realize what is going on if at all. Often it's even more than one State trying to achieve the same without it being "visible". TL;DR We don't know shit by just observing media reports & firm/executive behavior. But if you did a actual "Follow the Money" on Durov, i'd love to see it ! ( Although I do like what he seems to be doing. )

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