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UK government MPs are using Signal’s automatic deletion feature
- afandian 6y agoFor those unfamiliar, Private Eve is an excellent magazine with a long history. It takes a humourous but serious investgative look at UK politics, business etc looking at eg corruption and double standards. With cartoons and iconic front page puns. And for the large part it avoided the pitfalls of moving online. Current issue: https://www.private-eye.co.uk/current-issue https://www.private-eye.co.uk/current-issue
- dazzawazza 6y agoIt has consistently had (IMHO) the best pandemic coverage of any media. The MD section is brilliant, challenging and thought provoking... and it's a satirical magazine! (this says a lot about the poor state of media in general).
- TazeTSchnitzel 6y agoPrivate Eye avoided the paywall problem by not putting itself online at all, it only publishes selected articles online to leave you hungry for the rest :)
- miki123211 6y agoIt also avoided becoming accessible to the blind and other parts of the population who cannot read print.
- mellosouls 6y agoThis is a good point, accessibility is very important and it's a shame you've been downvoted. Private Eye is available in audio form through the RNIB, though it may just be a digest version as it looks like it's part of a weekly compilation from various publications. https://www.rnib.org.uk/daisy-magazines https://www.rnib.org.uk/daisy-magazines
- Angostura 6y agoI think RNIB do an audio read version
- johanek 6y agoA print subscription is £34 a year, delivered (in the U.K.). It’s ridiculously good value.
- noir_lord 6y agoSo good in fact that the managing editor is usually the most sued person in the UK. Ian Hislop is a national treasure and his evidence to the select committee on press intrusion was both erudite and hilarious.
- mabbo 6y agoHis TV panel show, "Have I Got News For You" is also wonderful. Just comedians, discussing and making jokes about the news, for something like 25 years now. And most of it is on YouTube.
- radicalbyte 6y agoOur PM was also a regular.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoTo be clear he didn't create the show, he's one of its stars.
- timthorn 6y agoThe show was a successful transition to television of the Radio 4 classic, "The News Quiz"
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoI've never paired them, curiously. The News Quiz is still a R4 show so transition would perhaps be the wrong word. Extension, assuming they have the same source as you imply with your comment.
- noir_lord 6y agoIndeed, I love The News Quiz though I still miss Sandy, the new host is great but not a match.
- iso947 6y ago
- ballooney 6y agoI strongly urge UK-base HNers to subscribe. It is one of the few national publications still doing proper long-term investigative journalism into local government (in a way that local papers haven’t had the resources to do for years) and usually signals important stories before the main papers pick them up, especially wrt stories about the rest of the news media. Many people stuck in large media orgs leak to the Eye so they can report that e.g. the Telegraph hasn’t been allowed to report on something that might damage the financial interests of its owners. And it’s quite funny.
- amiga_500 6y agoAgreed. I think their level of investigation is peerless. They go where others fear to tread. They ruffle more feathers in every single edition than the FT does in a year. I can't think of any other UK publication that comes close.
- tialaramex 6y agoIt's an overall excellent and very dense UK-specific read (~40 pages of editorial, cartoons and letters every fortnight). Several stories broken by Private Eye have ended up featuring on Hacker News much later too such as Horizon - an IT system for the UK's Post Office which somehow executives managed to persuade the courts was infallible, so if a bug in Horizon said your Post Office ought to have £10k of cash that it didn't you (the "Postmaster" of that office, typically a small local store owner making a little bit of extra money offering this vital service) might literally go to prison for stealing this money that never even existed. It does have its own unique culture you'd need to spin up on to really grok what's going on. For example it just calls the Queen "Brenda", and various government agencies get more apposite names like the "Fundamentally Supine Agency". And there are a lot of running jokes after existing for so long.
- amiga_500 6y agoIt's basically what the press looks like when they are doing their job. They are privately owned and on a mission to tell the truth, not to make as much money as possible. Hislop and before him Cook are actual real people trying to do something good instead of just attempting to get rich for the sake of it before dropping dead. There are lots of in jokes and also "code phrases", such as "tired and emotional" == drunk, more here [1]. I used to subscribe to it but cancelled it after I left the UK. The UK press are an absolute disaster. Most are partisan, including: Telegraph: torygraph Daily mail: torygraph FT: bankers times Guardian: with you until you need actual help then it's back to mi5 Sun/Times: Murdoch incorporated Private eye is literally carry everything on their shoulders. There is nothing else. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurring_themes_and_in-jokes_in_Private_Eye https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurring_themes_and_in-jokes_...
- Bokanovsky 6y agoPrivate Eye has also created one of the best legal responses that they cite now and again. In the case of Arkell v. Pressdram. If you're curious about it details are on Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Eye#Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Eye#Litigation
- DanBC 6y agoPrivate Eye is very good, but they don't always get it right. > Even when an error does not end up in the law courts, it can still prove embarrassing. The magazine was at the forefront of challenging the MMR triple vaccine - devoting a special-edition pamphlet to the subject. A defiant Hislop insists that the Eye was right to raise the questions it did and to defend the reputation of Andrew Wakefield, the controversial doctor who first suggested there might be a link between MMR, autism and bowel disease - a theory ruled out by the latest comprehensive review of evidence. "There's nothing there that I don't think is right. We came into the story about the hounding of Wakefield and the idea that he wasn't a bona fide doctor, who'd done a huge amount of good looking after these children - the parents certainly bear witness to that. All his stuff beforehand was peer-reviewed and no one said, 'This man's a lunatic' about the link between bowel disease and autism. The work he's still doing is still perfectly OK. I don't accept the claim, 'You added to a climate of hysteria, which means herd immunity will go down and therefore it's all your fault.' I think the questions we asked at the time were acceptable to ask." That leaflet was published in 2002, when the science was pretty clear. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1123186/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1123186/
- billme 6y agoFor those not following the topic, among others, the UK, EU, US - all officially endorsed the use of Signal for official government use.
- BiteCode_dev 6y agoDo you have a link for that? I often get ask questions about secure messaging, and I always have a hard time giving anything better than "it depends".
- billme 6y ago—————————— UK example reference: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/12/20/uk_conservatives_brexit_from_whatsapp_to_signal/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/12/20/uk_conservatives_br... —————————— EU example reference: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/24/21150918/european-commission-signal-encrypted-messaging https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/24/21150918/european-commiss... —————————— US example drafted by NSA: https://media.defense.gov/2020/Apr/24/2002288652/-1/-1/0/CSI-SELECTING-AND-USING-COLLABORATION-SERVICES-SECURELY-LONG-FINAL.PDF https://media.defense.gov/2020/Apr/24/2002288652/-1/-1/0/CSI... * Note this document is for public release. If you dig around you will find references to deploy US Special Forces even using Signal for official communications within combat zones. ——————————
- BiteCode_dev 6y agoThanks a lot.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago>US Special Forces even using Signal for official communications within combat zones // Do they have some other systems for using Signal on, they can't use it on regular mobile phones without being tracked by base-stations, surely?
- bencollier49 6y agoI think they ought to legislate this into normality. The alternative is to make it mandatory to note all conversations with colleagues for the public record, however trivial, which is obviously absurd. An IM conversation is a personal conversation, treating it any other way will stifle the effective function of government.
- Sevaris 6y agoIt's not a personal conversation if you're working for the government and talking about topics that pertain to government functions. You have no right to privacy in the same way that your average citizen (should) be when your decisions affect the lives of millions. There needs to be a paper trail or power becomes even more opaque than it already is and all accountability goes out the window. There can be no democracy if your government can hide everything they do. The records don't necessarily need to always be public, but they do need to be stored so FOI requests can be served when necessary.
- bencollier49 6y agoOkay, so you believe that all conversations between lawmakers of any sort ought to be recorded?
- Sevaris 6y agoObviously, yes. Nixon would never have been impeached without the tapes. If there's no record, there's no accountability. That's just how it is.
- evgen 6y agoWhile we are at it lets also mandate that all work-related communications you make are similarly archived. There is a long history of corporate malfeasance leading to catastrophic outcomes for the general public and we need to make sure that people like you are held accountable when your failures and bad decisions lead to poor outcomes. I am sure you will agree that without good record-keeping a lack of accountability for your actions is bound to lead to disaster. We will also expect a written transcript of all work conversations, no matter how innocuous you might think them to be, within 48 hours of the conversation. Thanks!
- laumars 6y agoIt’s “funny” how the U.K. government endorse signal for covering their tracks but want backdoors put in because other people can’t be trusted. Furthermore, it should be illegal for governments to use self-destructing messages.
- Frenchgeek 6y agoNot surprising really: People do tend to assume others will act like themselves would in the same situation.
- fit2rule 6y agoGovernment secrecy should be absolutely restricted by the general public - it is the beginning of all corruption of government. The UK headed down the wrong path towards totalitarian class-ist society when it decided the common people shouldn't know their own governments' secrets.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tialaramex 6y agoWhen the government passed laws authorising itself to snoop on all Internet traffic, some MPs asked if there couldn't be an exception for them, since after all certainly they aren't terrorists or paedophiles... The response (IIRC from Theresa May who was Home Secretary at the time) was that this would be technically impossible. The reason of course is that although the law is written in a way that suggests the letter authorising interception looks like "Dear Tiny ISP, you are required to store all the data about Bill The Terrorist so we can investigate very important crimes, love, the Home Secretary XX" the actual letters go like this: "Dear 10Tb/s Internet interchange, you are required to store literally everything, so that we can investigate whatever we want, love, the Home Secretary XX". You could easily never issue letters requesting data for an individual MP, but if you never even intended to name individuals anyway then that's obviously not going to work...
- TazeTSchnitzel 6y agoHow different is this from previous use of phone calls? I guess they can have many participants and stretch over much longer periods of time.
- dan-robertson 6y agoI’m in two minds about this. I think it’s pretty sleazy to be using signal to evade record keeping requirements. I also think it’s important to have transparency into things governments do. But I also worry that such requirements can lead to worse results. Generally in a well run organisation, you want people to be able to speak their mind and disagree about things, but if the organisation makes a bad decision and those disagreements are recorded, they will be used against them. For an arbitrary example, look at the Boeing 737 max. There were some internal emails claiming that the system which turned out not to be safe wasn’t safe (the problem with these was probably that they didn’t seem to make their way up to anyone who could change the decision), and probably the fallout from them will be worse than if there were no such emails and Boeing just appeared to not have considered the possibility of failure. This gives the message that one shouldn’t have these discussions through email because that gives the impression that known issues were ignored if they turn out to have mattered. But no one asked about the cases where people had raised concerns by email and they were corrected by redesigning things or where concerns were raised but deemed to not be significant and turned out not to be significant. It seems better to me for people to be able to voice disagreements. Another example is in healthcare: I suspect people get worse outcomes because if anyone has a different (potentially better) opinion about how a patient may be treated, they are incentivised not to voice it because any disagreement in a hospitals records will make for a much stronger case in any litigation against a hospital. Perhaps the issue is that the media or public inquiries (or maybe courts or juries) will look at any such record as a sign of negligence rather than an ordinary thing which happens all the time in cases that go wrong and right. But maybe signal is really being used for political scheming and some public business overflows onto signal unintentionally.
- heavenlyblue 6y agoThe issue is that UK politicians have themselves decided to evade rather than going through the legal, public process of allowing this to happen. Even if you agree that some privacy in communications must be preserved, they didn’t do that through a process a part of which they themselves are.
- Jestar342 6y ago> For an arbitrary example, look at the Boeing 737 max. There were some internal emails claiming that the system which turned out not to be safe wasn’t safe (the problem with these was probably that they didn’t seem to make their way up to anyone who could change the decision), and probably the fallout from them will be worse than if there were no such emails and Boeing just appeared to not have considered the possibility of failure. This gives the message that one shouldn’t have these discussions through email because that gives the impression that known issues were ignored if they turn out to have mattered. But no one asked about the cases where people had raised concerns by email and they were corrected by redesigning things or where concerns were raised but deemed to not be significant and turned out not to be significant. It seems better to me for people to be able to voice disagreements. I'm sorry, but what?! The fallout of the 737 max debacle is that the senior people didn't listen when the engineers raised concerns about safety. This is a solid example of why comms _should_ be recorded, and wholly _not_ the example of why they should not.
- pjc50 6y agoOddly, all the internal party shenanigans seem to be done over Whatsapp still - but the main threat there is leaking from the recipients. And this particular government seems particularly untrustworthy at a particularly difficult time.
- cheschire 6y agoI had a buddy a couple years ago who was a low level FOIA officer in the U.S. military. He was telling me that shortly after the Clinton email scandal there was a policy pushed on all his branch's computers that forced encryption to be turned on for all users. What that resulted in was basically a complete shutdown of email discovery for fulfilling FOIA requests. You go into Outlook, do a search, and if it's not in the subject line of the email then it's simply not found. He told the story as if it was a conspiracy against FOIA, but based on my experience of dealing with bureaucracies, it was more likely just coincidence. Never attribute to malice what could be explained with incompetence.
- clort 6y agoIncompetence is what leads to doing nothing and scandals continuing to happen because people have access to information that exposes hypocrisy and wrongdoing that offends them. As this was a reaction to a scandal I'm going to say your buddy was on track, it was done intentionally in order to frustrate future discovery. (Not solely a conspiracy against FOIA particularly but that is one method used to reveal information)
- cheschire 6y agoIt was done near a scandal, but not necessarily in reaction to one. Correlation is not causation.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoDoes anything, anything happen in politics that isn't in reaction to a causation?
- cheschire 6y agoNewton's third law confirms that yes, everything in politics occurs in reaction to some other causation. However correlating two items together based on timestamp alone is not enough to validate causation.
- tarkin2 6y agoI can’t help but laugh a sad laugh. I oppose government monitoring and support transparency. And I support Signal to avoid monitoring and now it’s used to remove transparency. I can’t get my friends to install Signal because they say they have nothing to hide from their government and now the same government is using Signal to hide from my friends. Moxie should add it to the advertising blurb:” We’re so secure the British government use Signal to hide from its citizens.”
- vondro 6y agoRe: trying to get friends to install Signal Been there, but <rant>it got even harder as Signal makes it mandatory to set a PIN now which cannot be skipped, all because of future 'cloud backup' feature. It kinda stinks to me, as Signal bragged about not keeping almost any metadata, and now they want to keep backups. Whats worse, it seems there is no opt-out.<rant/> Makes it hard to recommend Signal now. As a Signal user, what do you think about Signal's recent development?
- tarkin2 6y agoI’ve not followed them too much but trust Moxie since his previous decision were good. I think Signal is trying to gain more mainstream adoption and it will need backups for that. The pin is annoying but if it gives the app secure backups then I guess it’s a good idea. Although I agree having an opt-out would be good (but I expect most people want backups)
- tomhoward 6y agoSome points to consider: - From the article: “Starting in late 2004, before the FOIA came into force in early 2005, Downing Street implemented an automatic 90-day deletion of emails aside from those specifically selected by civil servants as relevant for storage in the National Archives” - Since the invention of the telephone, it's never been an expectation that transcripts of telephone calls between MPs or officials should be recorded and made available under FOI. - Indeed, it's never been an expectation that private face-to-face conversations between MPs/officials be recorded and made available under FOI. - At least according to FOI laws I'm vaguely familiar with (in Australia), an FOI request can only be made for an item of information that is known to exist. People can't go on "fishing expeditions" for, say, all communications between nominated people over a nominated period of time. Thus, if UK FOI is similarly constrained, it's usually going to be unlikely a private messaging app conversation could be sought under FOI anyway. All that considered, I don't think this is that big a deal.
- pwc 6y ago> At least according to FOI laws I'm vaguely familiar with (in Australia), an FOI request can only be made for an item of information that is known to exist. People can't go on "fishing expeditions" for, say, all communications between nominated people over a nominated period of time. Interestingly I don't think this is 100% true - under (for example) the federal FOI Act I think a request framed as asking for "email sent on government systems between Alice and Bob in the last six months" would be facially valid, if Alice and Bob were civil servants (although of course exemptions may apply to individual emails). Here's an (Australian) FOI request that is similar in spirit to your example: https://www.righttoknow.org.au/request/philip_gaetjens_the_liberal_part https://www.righttoknow.org.au/request/philip_gaetjens_the_l... which asks for "any emails contained in all of Philip Gaetjens’ outlook items (including deleted items) that contain any of the following terms (in the body of an email and/or in the addressee fields of an email): “liberal.org.au” or “ipa.org.au”", and the department deemed that a valid request. (Philip Gaetjens is a senior civil servant, the Liberals are a political party and the IPA is a right-leaning think tank; it's reasonable to infer that the fishing here is for evidence of a link between the civil service and a particular side of politics.)
- LatteLazy 6y agoWhile voting to ban normal people from using any form of encryption in any form...
- emilfihlman 6y agoForcefully deleting stuff from my device is super annoying and I'll fight that to the bitter end.
- zajio1am 6y agoYes, software that forcefully deletes received messages from recipient device is software acting against intent and will of its user (recipient). We have one word for such software - malware.
- mellosouls 6y agoTangentially, the UK government digital service (and made available to the wider civil service) uses the free tier version of Slack which retains but disallows access to historic messages. FOI in this case (in lieu of anybody coughing up the licences) relies on regular manual exports and their secure archiving. This isn't afaik an attempt to avoid accountability (in fact it's the opposite), just a good faith use of free software to enable cross department communication in the absence of a service from a high level mandated corporate partner. https://www.computerweekly.com/news/450423927/ICO-highlights-challenge-cloud-based-comms-tools-pose-to-public-sector-FOI-request-compliance https://www.computerweekly.com/news/450423927/ICO-highlights...
- kees99 6y ago> Slack [...] just a good faith use of free software [...] Since when is Slack free software?
- ThePowerOfFuet 6y agoIt sounds like you are conflating free software and Free software.
- kees99 6y agoI don't think capitalization matters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software In addition to not being free, Slack is also not software. It's a service. Sure, there's some software involved in making that service tick (mostly proprietary), as well as some limited gratis access ("free tier") being offered, but that doesn't magically transform that service into "free software".
- mellosouls 6y agoWhich I clearly referred to with "free tier version of Slack". What's the complaint here? Update: you've edited the parent since I responded to it. Your original comment was something like "it's not free, part of it is free" Still no idea what you're moaning about tho...
- crtasm 6y agoPlease change the title here, the article posits that MPs may be using disappearing messages, but does not make any claims they are doing so.
- sailfast 6y ago> if the records have already been deleted, or indeed are automatically deleted after the request is made, no crime is committed This isn’t true under US law. No matter where you conduct your work, if you destroy a record without capturing it as required by your records schedule, you have violated the law, whether there is a FOIA request or not. It is your responsibility to migrate record material to an appropriate location. If you conduct official business on any of these platforms with auto-destruct that seems suspect to me and cause for some sort of censure, just like a stock trading floor doing this would be in breach of regulation.
- truculent 6y agoIt’s okay, the leopards would never eat _my_ face
- subsubsub 6y agoIsn't this better than them using whatsapp and having everything they write read by a foreign government? At least someone has some technical knowledge. Was a bit worried about them after their zoom screenshot debacle.