A likely explanation is that the communications director (or the people informing her) wouldn’t know to distinguish between Signal the app, and a Signal compatible app that is nearly indistinguishable from Signal. A lot like Kleenex is a common term for tissue paper regardless of brand.
When the leak was first revealed, there was loud speculation about the legality of government chat messages being set to auto-delete. This additional revelation, about the use of TeleMessage, shows that someone with a security background has actually thought about these things. It makes perfect security sense to archive messages somewhere secure, off phone, for record keeping compliance while ensuring that relatively vulnerable phones don’t retain messages for very long. It’s also an easy explanation for why such an app was created in the first place. There is an obvious market for it.
We only have evidence they used TeleMessage after the scandal. When the same guy let the press take a photo of his messages with Vance, Rubio, Gabbard and others.
Only if this his standard govt issued phone. It's also been shown they are also using their own personal phones. The could easily be using unapproved phones some random DOGE'er bought gave them with an MDM setup, without any real oversight.
edit: found their install doc! https://smarsh.my.salesforce.com/sfc/p/#30000001FgxH/a/Pb000...
No. Even if you managed to get the app and push it to devices, you can't just use TM-SGNL without having an archiving account from Telemessage.
Source: I manage this exact setup for several clients.
Why wouldn't the government (DOGE in this scenario) be able to get an archiving account?
[0]: https://www.404media.co/the-signal-clone-the-trump-admin-use...
Read their install guide and weep at the idea of pushing cracked WhatsApp binaires through MDM https://smarsh.my.salesforce.com/sfc/p/#30000001FgxH/a/Pb000...
On a more meta note, I wonder who even works at companies founded on ideas that are just... bad. On average, I expect good engineers to push back on such business requirements and also have better job mobility so they can leave and work elsewhere. The researcher found the vulnerabilities "in less than 30 minutes" so it seems there's some lack of competence here.
Unfortunately, misguided business requirements like this won't simply disappear and I get that those can be niche offerings that attract juicy contracts.
I wouldn't be surprised if it at least 25% of HN has worked for such companies for at least 2 years of their career.
Every single article is written with the presumption that there are no actual IT people in the White House, that someone wheeled in a Starlink dish on a dessert cart in the yard which is somehow running the entire government. It's silly and ridiculous.
As is putting someone with a brain parasite and anti-vax beliefs as the head of HHS, but here we are.
“Silly and ridiculous” does not mean “implausible” with this administration. It’s the standard.
That situation was ridiculous, in that to score the marketing points, but fighting with the whitehouse IT the starlink is installed at a remote location with much the same point of failure as their fibre services.
Veterans Affairs actually publishes a list of approved software as part of their Technical Reference Model: https://www.oit.va.gov/services/trm/ (don’t know how complete it is)
But I’m not aware of other agencies doing this. I suppose that VA, given the nature of what they do, likely feels that there is less risk in publicising this information
There’s also the FedRAMP program for centralized review of cloud services - fedramp.gov - I haven’t looked to see if Telemessage is listed as approved but I see some references to FedRAMP and Telemessage online suggesting that it may be
Another source of info is SAM.gov - https://sam.gov/opp/ab5e8a486e074d73bfe09b383ba819ab/view (that’s for NIH) - if there is an agency paying for it, you can assume they’ve approved it for use (or are in the process of doing so) even if they haven’t otherwise publicly said they are. But, not all contracts are public, so just because you can’t find it on SAM.gov doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist
Source: I'm the admin who installs TM-SGNL for many users.
So... is it properly open source?
His repo, not theirs: https://github.com/micahflee/TM-SGNL-Android/commits/master/
He points out that "You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy."
No. Just no. Anyone who has handled TS information would know how nutz that sounds. Irrespective of software, TS stuff is only ever displayed in special rooms with big doors and a man with a gun outside. The concept of having TS on an everyday-use cellphone is just maddening.