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Comment by beardedwizard | Hacker News Reader

They are using unofficial comms to stay off the record and unaccountable, it has nothing to do with ease of use.

That's possible I suppose, but do you have any evidence of that or is it just your personal biases causing you to assume the worst motivation you can imagine must be the correct one?

I know personally that given the choice I'd probably rather use Signal than whatever messaging system the DoD contractors managed to come up with. And private conversations between senior military officials over encrypted DoD communication channels probably aren't FOIAable anyway.

Perhaps, but the simplest answer is often the correct one. People are exactly who they appear to be.

But the simple answer is that the devices suck and people don't want to use them. This is going to be more and more true as time goes on because new people coming in will be used to the creature comforts they have from their personal equipment. I'm not defending anyone here, the people in power need to be held to a higher standard than some rando citizen on the street.

IIRC, DoD uses Wickr RAM for TS messaging and Teams for non-sensitive comms.

Both are fairly "meh" WRT to usability, but neither are so awful people should be breaking the law over it.

Wickr is supposed to only used for unclassified info like health data.

They have a completely sepearate internet for TS/SCI (JWICS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Worldwide_Intelligence_C...)

I thought there was a build/version of WICKR for DoD-like usage. Maybe not.

I think Wickr RAM is specific to DoD... still not for anything S/TS

> That's possible I suppose, but do you have any evidence of that

Yes, in the chat where a reporter was accidentally present, many of the messages were set to be disappearing. I don't know why anyone would do that if not to avoid recordkeeping laws.

> The images of the text chain show that the messages were set to disappear in one week.

https://apnews.com/article/war-plans-hegseth-signal-chat-inv...

Further, Project 2025 suggests bypassing federal record keeping legislation by simply holding in-person meetings without record.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxe55mU4DA8

Oddly, the Project 2025 training videos that presumably the members of the executive cabinet have seen say _not_ to delete messages or set messages to auto-deleting _because_ that would be in violation of federal record keeping legislation.

That is not the worst motivation I can imagine.

Tell us the worst one you can imagine, please.

The worst one is obvious: the people involved are foreign agents.

The real answer is that none of the people Hegseth wants to show off to have access to those networks.

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