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Comment by jandrewrogers | Hacker News Reader

A lot of tech people here are obviously unfamiliar with the history of this. They used to use Gmail for nominally unclassified communication. Several years ago they unceremoniously dropped Gmail for all purposes, without much explanation. It was mostly replaced with Signal.

I originally started using Signal almost entirely as a side effect of this transition. It was blessed as a preferred choice of the US intelligence community for unclassified comms many years ago. And a lot of classified comms if we are honest. If you worked in the US government, you needed Signal.

This isn’t a value judgement, just an acknowledgement of reality. Given this, it would be weird if they didn’t have Signal installed.

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I can second this, and I'll add that other corners of the bureaucracy also like Signal. From my POV, the interesting part is that the CIA has incorporated Signal into SOP, rather than it being an ad-hoc thing.

It's probably a matter of pragmatism. People are gonna use instant messengers, might as well recommend the least bad one. I've seen it in corporate environments too. If you have locked-down workstations, there's usually some list of free software that isn't officially supported, but doesn't require special approvals.

It seems strange that the CIA isn't running their own fork of signal which uses their own servers to avoid leaking metadata.

Not really. The killer feature of Signal isn’t the encryption it’s auto-deletion.

Which any CIA fork would not be able to keep since it violates FOIA laws.

Yes, the scandal here is not just the questionable security. It is also clear intent to circumvent transparency laws which suggests they may be intending to hide the breaking of other laws.

Honest question, why is it legal to use auto deletion with Signal, but illegal to have a fork of Signal with auto deletion?

it is not legal, but that also doesnt matter when nobody can enforce it

Using signal with auto deletion is illegal. Creating a fork of Signal for CIA (or whichever) use and then deliberately not removing auto-deletion is really illegal. I think that's the thought process, at least.

I’ve seen others within the CIA say that the statements about signal being pre installed are false.

> And a lot of classified comms if we are honest

Those people should receive administrative reprimands for that, probably up to termination. If they were discussing active strikes, targets, and intelligence sources, then they should probably be indicted.

If history has taught us anything (Hillary), that's just wishful thinking from people without power and political rivals. On rational side, most likely one of their phones got hacked which caused this leak. They are high profile targets after all. At their level, exactly what's the SOPs they must follow otherwise gonna get fired? They may push for policies downstream, but policies that govern them? They can just argue for precedence (Hillary) and nothing gonna come of this.

It was my understanding that after extensive investigation there was found to be no classified material shared on that server - which checks out since emailing classified information is pretty uncommon outside of SIPRNET and the like

I don't know how they would classify gossips, opinions, deals made by a Secretary of State with or regarding the heads of foreign nations. I'm sure it's an "extensive" investigation. Haha. Democrats probably just want to sweep it under the rug, and Republicans want to use it for favors/card in this situation.

> I'm sure it's an "extensive" investigation.

This specific desire to not do unnecessary legwork, and lean on the assumptions we already hold, are the teeth of the termites that tear through society and lead to polarization.

It’s not a criticism - I couldn’t be less inclined to go through the actual searches to verify this either way.

This is just the failure state that happens an infinite number of times online every day, across the world.

At some point, the conversations start demanding a level of work that’s beyond what we are willing to put in. I can’t see any real solution for it. (Unless there’s some GAI magic wand for this.)

Congressional republicans investigated extensively and had a vested interest in finding wrongdoing.

There is a world of difference between everyday government conversations.

And discussing a country being bombed including exact times, what weapons are being used, locations of US personnel etc. And where one of the members of that group was in Moscow visiting Putin and likely would’ve been using a Russian WiFi network or cellular connection.

No reason, whatsoever, for Signal to be used in this situation.

>No reason, whatsoever, for Signal to be used in this situation.

It sounds like the exact appropriate time to use Signal. It turns out that some high ranking official's jobs involve traveling to unfriendly or hostile countries. They still sometimes need to weigh in on classified communications. It was true back when Hilary was signing off on drone targets through text, and its true today.

There are secure methods of communication that don’t involve public networks.

And don’t forget that the Pentagon was warning that “Russian professional hacking groups are employing the 'linked devices' features to spy on encrypted conversations”

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/25/nx-s1-5339801/pentagon-email-...

That's quite ridiculous. What about the security of the phone they are using? When Hillary was signing off on drones via text, that was incredibly stupid and it remains true today.

Nothing is binary, everything is a tradeoff. Her texts didn't mention specifics so presumably anyone eavesdropping wouldn't have been able to identify the exact context. It's reasonable for high level officials to weigh the cost vs benefit. When you're one or two steps away from the president, you have a lot of leeway.

Yeah, you don't discuss war planning over an insecure phone. The OP talked about "in this situation", so no, you don't do that. And at least one member of that Signal chat was in Russia.

When you are one or two steps away from the President, you should be even more careful.

how different is it really though?

the US government is lookjng to reduce its global influence; making everything public is great

There are record retentions laws the very existence of Signal should be a violation. This is why nothing is goin to happen because they are all Breaking THE LAW anytime deletion is on

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