First time I am seeing an organization against this. Kudos to them for standing up.
> Men Försvarsmakten är negativa och nyligen uppmanade försvaret sin personal att börja använda Signal för att minska risken för avlyssning.
> I ett brev till regeringen skriver Försvarsmakten att lagförslaget inte kommer kunna förverkligas ”utan att införa sårbarheter och bakdörrar som kan komma att nyttjas av tredje part”.
> In a letter to the government, the Swedish Armed Forces writes that the legislative proposal will not be able to be implemented "without introducing vulnerabilities and backdoors that may be utilized by third parties."
(Possibly) SAF is negative because they use Signal, and don't want a law that would introduce vulnerabilities into Signal that could be utilized by third parties.
They are militaries, not police or intelligence forces. The job is to be ready to do war, not nanny and snoop on civilians (Some of that might be a necessary side effect but it isn’t their reason for being).
arguably, one of the reasons it was released to the public was to get large amounts of traffic using onion routing. because if it's just 50 data steams that are entirely ONI or NSA then it's easy to hit them with timing attacks.
but 2+ million streams from all over makes it a lot easier to hide.
As good as Signal is I mean, you will want something under your control.
> This week, Brigadier General Mattias Hanson, the Swedish Armed Forces' CIO (Chief Information Officer), decided that calls and text messages that do not concern classified information should, as far as possible, be made using the Signal app. The decision aims to make it more difficult to intercept calls and messages sent via the telephone network.
https://www.forsvarsmakten.se/sv/aktuellt/2025/02/forsvarsma...
Seems people were using SMS for those messages they are now advocating to use Signal for.
Also, seems they've done a review (obviously) but unclear if they had access to something internal from Signal to do the review, feels like they had to:
> The Signal application has been deemed by the Swedish Armed Forces to have sufficient security to make it difficult to intercept calls and messages.
>Because everything in Signal is end-to-end encrypted, we can rent server infrastructure from a variety of providers like Amazon AWS, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, and others while ensuring that your messages and calls remain private and secure.
I was a communications specialist for the Swedish Armed forces 10+ years ago, including a tour in Afghanistan and a tour in Kosovo.
We used radio links for internet that I can tell you, were more adversarial than friendly.
The Swedish military is highly capable when it comes to network communications. A small nation will have to think differently.
You could potentially use an instant messaging system in control by someone else, if you are willing and capable of sharing encryption keys with whomever you are going to communicate with beforehand.