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> They can't mandate a backdoor for something other parts of the government rely on to be secure.

Why not? It wouldn't be difficult to have a backdoor in the civilian use-case that's disabled for government use.

A major reason for these people using Signal is specifically to avoid government access to records of these chats. In particular access by future administrations, or current or near future judicial or congressional investigations.

Now the task of an adversary is to simply enable the backdoor rather than create it from scratch. The people using Signal for this are doing it on their own devices, so now you have multiple problems.

Eg how to get non technical people to know when they’re using the civilian version.

Alternative crazy universe: Just use the tech that was created for the government and does all the right things.

I'm not defending the use of signal. That said this strawman is very weak. It's not uncommon to have two versions of the same app on your phone these days. My Google drive instance changes from personal to company based on my identity. This isn't hard to implement securely these days.

But then you’re required to archive the discussions for the public to access. That’s much worse for these people than foreign agents (and journalists apparently) listening in and taking notes.

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