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Comment by voytec | Hacker News Reader

> 404 Media journalist Joseph Cox published a story pointing out that Waltz was not using the official Signal app, but rather "an obscure and unofficial version of Signal that is designed to archive messages"

Wow. And that's while their entire point of using Signal is to have conversations scrapped after a week to leave no no traces of criminal activity.

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Do you think they are using the message archiving version so that they can meet organizational message retention requirements? Maybe they are using signal to ensure they have e2e encrypted messaging on their devices?

There are already government e2e apps. The only reason to use something else is to have selective auto-deletion and/or to use personal devices for official classified data.

Another reason: all of the folks on that group chat have legitimate reasons to have contacts on their phone that would be outside government apps. Foreign leadership. Journalists. Etc.

Signal is likely to be one of the main ways of communicating with those.

Using separate apps for government and external communication might have prevented the recent scandal.

It wouldn't actually. The contact in his phone (incorrectly added by Apple AI from a forwarded email) would be the same regardless which app he was using.

Instead, Signal (and this forked version) would have to do its own independent contact management, maybe based on in-person scanning of QR codes plus web-of-trust.

The contact (a journalist) wouldn't be reachable on a government messaging app.

Signal does have its own contacts management and doesn't have to be allowed access to OS-native contacts.

If only it would a- not ask you to access your contacts and b- accept when you say no instead of saying "we'll ask again later" (and then, indeed, asking again later).

Do you have the link to this alleged government-produced e2e software so we can inspect ourselves? I realize they have an incentive to appear incompetent, but surely there must be evidence (further than your testimony) of such gossip popping up somewhere

There are not just government e2e apps, but government-provided and customised smartphones specifically for them, like the DMCC-S programme. [0]

Some of the apps are listed in that brochure.

There's no excuse for using Signal on personal devices for classified conversations.

[0] https://www.disa.mil/~/media/files/disa/fact-sheets/dmcc-s.p...

Are the apps usable? The jargon seems intentionally impenetrable. The editor of that document should be shot every time they used an acronym. Like i get the DOD is a profitable dick to suck but this is just embarrassing for a document intended for the public.

Anyway can you link the source? That's presumably the useful half. The marketing bit doesn't add anything.

I don't care how usable they are, this is the DoD and NSA-approved mechanism for conducting classified conversations and viewing classified data on mobile devices. The adversaries here are other countries who are very good at what they do, security is far more important than convenience.

As for further research, there's plenty online about his programme and these devices. Feel free to Google it yourself. You're asking to be spoonfed.

So, I think it's pretty straighforward.

First, they are not supposed to use personal devices for classified conversations.

But they are allowed to use ordinary consumer devices for non-classified conversations. That even if not classified, they still might want to be secure -- or to communicate with other people who prefer signal.

But those conversations need to be archived, per government policy.

So on their ordinary consumer devices have a version of Signal on it that archives, to meet ordinary government policies.

This is all ordinary, and I believe probably the previosu administraiton had the same thing.

The only non-ordinary thing is that they insisted on using the consumer devices for classified conversations even though it violates policy, so just use the 'best' app on there for that. Which is not good enough, because you are not supposed to be having conversations including classified material on ordinary consumer devices, because they are not secure enough.

I don't think it follows that they selected the archiving messenger because they wanted disappearing messages. The whole disappearing messages thing was just internet speculation.

No it was reported by the journalist who was in the chat.

> Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/trump-a...

Whether it was for that purpose or not, the messages did wind up disappearing. The CIA admitted it in a court filing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/us/politics/cia-director-...

This TM SGNL app is compatible with legit Signal clients and servers.

It’s also possible that they are using this app to archive chats that other parties _believe_ to be disappeared.

In other words, set your chats to disappear in 5 minutes and convince your target to dish some sensitive info. They think it’s off the record, but it’s instantly archived

The counterparty should be naive or stupid to think that whatever they send has no chance to be recorded forever. They should always assume otherwise.

The only interesting use case of disappearing messages is that messages one receives will disappear securely, even if they forget about receiving such messages, or have no access to the device at the time.

Naive or stupid? No way, not the counterparties of alcoholic media personalities.

You can turn off message disappearance with the app store app so this seems like a red herring.

Maybe they wanted to use Signal to thwart eavesdropping but they had to modify it in order to comply with govt record retention requirements?

this appears to be the most concise answer. TM SGNL provides interop with Signal users in the field, but also includes FOIA archiving.

who manages the archiving service is a general government problem, and less of one for Signal or appointees. NSA should have been operating the archiving service and not a foreign country imo.

Distantly reminds me of the Nixon tapes ... what could go wrong?

I wonder what the people he communicated with knew / thought?

What? The point of Signal is not message scraping, but a good E2E encryption. Message scraping is just one feature the app provides that you can turn of if you wish.

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