News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious biased sources will be removed at the mods’ discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted separately but not to the post body. Sources may be checked for reliability using Wikipedia, MBFC, AdFontes, GroundNews, etc.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source. Clickbait titles may be removed.
Posts which titles don’t match the source may be removed. If the site changed their headline, we may ask you to update the post title. Clickbait titles use hyperbolic language and do not accurately describe the article content. When necessary, post titles may be edited, clearly marked with [brackets], but may never be used to editorialize or comment on the content.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials, videos, blogs, press releases, or celebrity gossip will be allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis. Mods may use discretion to pre-approve videos or press releases from highly credible sources that provide unique, newsworthy content not available or possible in another format.
7. No duplicate posts.
If an article has already been posted, it will be removed. Different articles reporting on the same subject are permitted. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners or news aggregators.
All posts must link to original article sources. You may include archival links in the post description. News aggregators such as Yahoo, Google, Hacker News, etc. should be avoided in favor of the original source link. Newswire services such as AP, Reuters, or AFP, are frequently republished and may be shared from other credible sources.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
Yes.
The answer is that this is all a bunch of stupid bullshit and that the Trumplicans truly don't give a damn about laws that no one can force them to follow.
At this point, there's really no point in trying to look for consistency or rational justification for anything these people do.
What laws are being broken? If republicans control both houses, why don't they approve the app or change the law?
Government communications must be archived.
By using Signal, they're intentionally breaking the law since Signal doesn't retain communications. The only conclusion that can be drawn from this is they don't want a record so they can't be held accountable in the future.
The simple answer is that this wouldn't pass the Senate, because the filibuster still exists (for now) and you need 2/3s vote to end debate and hold a vote (called cloture). It's unlikely you'd get the 15 or so Dems needed for this to happen.
The complicated answer is that Congress has been perfectly happy ceding more and more of its authority to the Presidency for a long time now. When you're elected for a two-year term (as Representatives are) but spend 1+ year campaigning (because seriously, fuck US elections) you don't want to do anything that even the short-term-memories of American voters might remember. So they're perfectly happy letting the President take the blame for anything if it's their party in the White House, or obstructing him if it's not.
The point they're trying to make seems to be that the specific unofficial Signal app they are using does archive those messages. So the fact Signal by itself doesn't, is irrelevant. The government is paying TeleMessage for this Signal app instead of using the official Signal app... The only reason for that would be for the archiving capability.
I mean... If they're using Signal specifically because it doesn't store messages, and they are trying to hide the communications and not archive them... They wouldn't be using the app capable of archiving them in the first place, they'd just use the official Signal app.
Not sure why this is hard for people to understand since the article is explaining exactly what this app is and does and how it bypasses the "Signal doesn't arching texts" issue entirely, because it doesn't matter what the official Signal app does or doesn't do.
Everyone gets that. What you don't seem to get is that when the law says government communications must be archived, it doesn't mean "an Israeli company has a copy of all my sensitive texts" is how to accomplish that.
How do you know they have access to the archived data? That's possible... but requires making assumptions that the application sends the archive data back to the company, which is not a guarantee by any means. Not everything operates via vendor-run infrastructure, most enterprise applications are designed to work with an enterprise-run solution for exactly this type of reason. This isn't a program aimed at the general public.
They make the client application, it is entirely possible that the client simply sends that data to a specified database, and the apps on these devices are set to a server run by the US government. It's not hard to verify where the archive info leaving a device via any network interface is going. You can't just hide a connection from the phone to an additional random server, especially if you're looking for weird connections when validating solutions to implement.
Is it possible that they have it running to a server run by the company? Of course it's possible. That doesn't mean it's plausible, or even likely here. We don't know how the app is set up or where it archives to. Assuming it must archive back to the company though is ignorant of how anything remotely related to these types of things work.
On a side note... When was the contract for this application setup? Was it signed by the Trump admin or has it been in place for years to archive these types of communications and we're only talking about it now because of the Trump officials being idiots brought it into the news cycle?
An archiving application isn't inherently insecure just because it's third party, or even made by a foreign company. There's a shit ton of technology bought from foreign countries because that's the best option.