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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

This isn't true, is it? If so that's slightly terrifying.

I think its increasingly true of several countries, not just the UK. Any State with strong Freedom of Information legislation not surprisingly creates incentives for certain political operatives to want to avoid exposure by use of unofficial channels further out of reach of FoI - private WhatsApp groups etc etc. I don't see this as any different than the instances of private email service mischief that has occurred in a lot of States too over the last decade (avoiding use of official email accounts for contentious discussions).

I think that if you hold a position in the government, all of your communication (including private email, chats, etc) should be subject to public scrutiny. A government official should be defined not as someone who is holding power, but as an elected representative of the people.

Did you even think out this train of thought? Does this cover medical communications, military secrets, private chat between family members, etc?

> Did you even think out this train of thought?

Of course not, I'm just a random person on the Internet ;)

The problem here is that a basic loophole is being abused to defeat the spirit of the law, thus making the operation of the government less transparent. The consequences should ramp up in proportion with the level of the abuse. You're using private WhatsApp to conduct state business? Your WhatsApp chat logs should be subject to FoI. If you want to keep family chat private, then move it to Telegram, and DON'T use Telegram to conduct state business, because otherwise your Telegram chat logs are next up to be scrutinized. I don't think the "spirit" of this idea is going too far?

> military secrets

There already are established procedures and laws for dealing with state secrets, including strategic information such as submarine designs, locations, nuke launch codes, etc. Whatever FoI/transparency laws are in place, they need to respect the need for protecting state secrets - that should be pretty obvious.

"should" being the operative word here.

All that would happen much of the time is that people stop writing anything of consequence down, or seek secret channels like the WhatsApp example. NHS employees in the UK as another example admit privately all the time to not recording things in meetings to avoid FoI exposure.

I agree with you in principle, but you are fighting human nature in practice - generally no one wants to look bad in public. I think FoI legislation is important, but in practice the results have often been mixed, and the approach probably needs to be nuanced.

> NHS employees in the UK as another example admit privately all the time to not recording things in meetings to avoid FoI exposure.

Do you have any examples please?

The political communications are done with WhatsApp. This is illegal of course.

There has been no discussion of the obvious national security risk.

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2022/mar/22/uk-ministers-acc...

This isn't even limited to the UK. In the US, we have presidents, vice presidents, and presidential candidates all under investigation for mishandling records by running their own e-mail servers. The most charitable explanation being that they don't want to have to deal with separate personal and work devices; the less charitable explanation being "fuck records laws".

I was a federal contractor for NASA and let me tell you about government email: quota of 250MB of storage (2010-2012).

I spent every morning moving emails with attachments to local folders on my Mac (which had no backups) to keep from going over quota. If I went on a 2 week vacation emails would start to bounce to me.

After that fiasco I understood why Colin Powell told Hillary Clinton to just run her own email server (for non-classified communication).

So what was keeping the President from just issuing an Executive Order increasing the email storage quota?

That would require increase in the backing storage.

The most charitable reason would be “I don’t want to deal with corporate Bs”. I’m sure we’ve all worked in those types of places.

Doesn’t really apply when it’s the Exco board though, if they say jump then it’s the CTOs job to make it happen.

The rules don't apply to them.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66165001

The rules never apply to them.

It's not completely untrue, there was a whole hoo-hah over getting Boris Johnsons WhatsApp messages. They use it to get around the requirement that official communications be logged and available for later scrutiny, much like a bank has to retain communications in case of an audit.

Assuming that is true, it's amusing that the politicians are trying to strip communications privacy from the masses while desiring it themselves.

You also need to understand the context that in the UK, and most of the west other than the US, WhatsApp is just the default communication channel for messaging. If you text someone, it's just assumed it's via WhatsApp.

I don't think so. When you text somebody it's assumed it's SMS, but if your friendship circle is on Android then in actual fact it's Google Messages.

All the same benefits: end-to-end encryption and data mining.

No. I have lived in the UK for 35 years and I didn't even know Google Messages existed until you mentioned it. WhatsApp is the default and I would only use SMS in the rare case that someone did not use WhatsApp.

There is no automatic integration on Android phones between SMS and another network the way iMessage is automatic.

Germany chiming in to agree.

WhatsApp is the default

> I have lived in the UK for 35 years and I didn't even know Google Messages existed until you mentioned it.

Exactly, even though it is the default messaging app on Android and receives their SMS texts for them, most users don't realise they are using it or that when they "send a text" to another Android user it is actually sending the message over data.

Anyway my understanding is that a text is a SMS text, and a whatsapp is a whatsapp message. I know that Google Messages hides itself by sending SMS texts when the number isn't known to Messages, and I guess Whatsapp does this too. I also live in the UK and occupy a space within multiple different communities which insist on different messaging apps. May be I just don't the option to be so vague.

I think what the parent meant was that if someone wants you to "text" them, they actually mean to send a message on WhatsApp and nothing to do with whatever texting on a given platform is.

Also, how are you data mining end-to-end encrypted messages? How can you get data out of messages you can't even see the contents of?

Well I assume that the end-to-end encryption is honoured, and the message is not parsed in any way at either end. I also assume that the end-to-end reference is between your phone and the phone of the intended recipient, and not between your phone and the server routing the message. I don't have access to the source so I don't have any way to prove that, but with the objections by Facebook/Whatsapp/Meta to breaking the encryption this seems to be the case.

No, the data-mining with these apps is in your list of contacts. Whatsapp takes these and builds you into a network. Its not what you say, it is who you are talking to and when. That is valuable.

When you sign up, you up load your contacts to Whatsapp. If you try to prevent it, it will insist and not work until you do. You can try to clear down your contacts and sign up without any. However, it will still take your number and look it up in the contacts of all those who have your number. It now has your name and any details your contacts have chosen to keep about you.

Also worth a note that Boris Johnson (former prime minister for those far from the UK) himself said he was happy to share all those WhatsApp messages on his phone with the investigation team, and it was a government department that stepped in to refuse access to those messages, repeatedly. They considered the WhatsApp messages too sensitive for an official investigation to read.

Well, if Boris Johnson said it, it must be true. It was his radical honesty that cost him the Prime Ministership, after all.

This does not reflect my experience at all. 3/5 would not vote again.

He wanted to share messages from mid 2021 onwards, not covering the onset of covid.

I think the replies and downvoter may have missed my intended point, which is that WhatsApp seems to be simultaneously treated as not an official channel and yet also treated as containing officially sensitive messages.

Whether Boris was telling the truth or not was irrelevant to my intended point.

I don’t think it’s as much official government discussion as it is party chatter. See lockdown party scandal, Forde report, typical CCHQ party lines.

It does seem to be slightly true

What they would use instead? Plain-text emails? Plain-text SMS? Paper mail?

Signal?

How is it different from WhatsApp (apart from being worse feature-wise and not many people using it)? As far as I remember, WhatsApp uses Signal's encryption, so technically they're the same level of protection?

France has their own version of Matrix

https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observato...

The article you've linked says it didn't go far (buggy, vulnerable, difficult to use, test deployment in 2020). Also, Google Play store's reviews say the same.

It's only natural that when a public servant want to make sure their message actually reaches the recipient, they would rather use a solution that 100% works. That's not malice, it's common sense.

Email using a secured mail server so that it doesn't go across the Internet?

This question confuses me. Are we really in a year where people don't know you can securely encrypt email within an organization? This is a solved problem, and it's been solved for decades.

It's confusing because you nailed "Plain-text emails" but completely ignored signed, encrypted emails for some reason.

I think the question is not whether it's possible to set up in theory.

The question is whether it's possible to actually deploy and maintain the solution in reality to millions of concurrent users in hundreds thousands of disjoint organizations in thousands of municipalities all over the country. It would require a constant supply (due to organizational churn) of highly qualified tech people who'd willing to be working years for low-five-figures salary in a rigid ineffective governmental structure, surrounded only by non-tech-savvy people. These tech people should also be saints so that they don't embezzle half the budgets while trying to set things up. Also the top visionary who'd push for this multi-year project should not be subject to election cycles.

I honestly think that this level of concentration of long-term effort might be impossible in a country with more than 10 million people or so.

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