Not a fan of the Trump administration but I imagine the official pentagon communications systems must be extremely clunky and annoying, and about 20 years behind civilian tech.
During the UK Covid-19 enquiry into gov decision making at that time it came to light that most of the UK cabinet were co-ordinating via Whatsapp groups. Again, I'm not a fan of Boris and Dom Cummings but this makes some sort of sense to me. I recognise the need for government teams to have quick convenient chat available to them. Things move too fast these days to wait for the next cabinet meeting or to arrange things via a series of phone calls.
The problem here is that the convenience is coming at the expense of proper identity management. SignalGate is a good example of the principle. Some Apple convenience feature helped the user by putting the phone number of the reporter into the addressbook under the identity of a government official. Signal then cheerfully used that incorrect phone number to add the reporter to the group chat.
That 20 year old tech is simply more secure... specifically because it is less convenient. By doing things the way they do them they can enforce access to desired levels of security by controlling physical access to the equipment. With something like Signal, that access is entirely the responsibility of the user. The user will inevitably mess that up, particularly when things get exciting. ... and Signal is not even really all that good at preventing the user from messing the identity thing up.
You are right, but I'd also say that high security brings a lot of friction that slows down decision making. Irrespective of Trump and his friends (whom I dont like) as a point of principle I think world leaders have to choose between secure and slow vs fast and risk of leaks. For most purposes, fast and risk of leaks is going to be more optimal.
I hear you both. Frankly, I think we could use a little friction in communication to slow it and the resulting decisions down. I don't know about everyone else, but I don't make best decisions on the fly.
And unarchived. It's very convenient to not have to do things in meetings with minutes where people might later question your decisions. Or report them to the police.
Yes you are right and these people probably are crooks. But in principle I think politicans should be able to have private conversations. These used to happen in literal back rooms but these days everyone is geographically spread out and thats not so possible. Formal decisions should be ratified in official minuted meetings but informal chat should also be possible. Because people need to actually talk to each other in an unguarded way to figure things out sometimes. At the moment the principle seems to be 'anything that a politican types to anyone else should be archived for later perusal' and I'm not sure that thats going to give us better decisions.
> [...] politicans should be able to have private conversations. [...] Because people need to actually talk to each other in an unguarded way to figure things out sometimes.
Which works fine as long as there are no bad actors who may bribe, corrupt, blackmail, etc. Unfortunately that is not the reality we live in and one way[0] of counteracting the bad actors is to enforce transparency with things like "everything must be recorded and archived".
Right but what is the cost of insisting that "everything must be recorded and archived". Are you going to strap recording devices onto everyone in congress? You have to have a mix of safeguards but also practicality, surely?
"Is this politican bad" is not a very good conversation for HN, but "what technology should politicians be using to make them effective" is a good topic for HN, and thats what I'm trying to have a conversation about
My kneejerk reaction is the same as yours, but the fact that they were using disappearing messages - they're using Signal to get around their legal reporting requirements. Even if they have other motivations, what they're doing is illegal.
Also, I complain a lot about Teams, but my understanding is modern DoD basically runs on Microsoft, AWS, (also Google?) just the same as private companies. Probably not Zoom, which is unfortunate from a usability perspective but also wise I think.
The whole world had to shift online with about 2 weeks notice, so I'll forgive them that. At the time I was kind of impressed to be honest that red tape didn't bring the govt machinery to a halt and that they were actually able to improvise a bit. But yes Zoom is not generally the platform I'd want them to use.
There were better alternatives and they had more time than that (when lockdown was possible but not enforced) to prepare.
IIRC the French installed gov controlled Jitsi server. That plus a VPN would be a whole not more secure.
If you do not have things in place I think "we need to discuss state secrets securely" would have been clearly sufficient to justify an exemption to lockdown rules.
Can you name a popular civilian tech that blocks adding random journalists to small chat groups? That includes strong identity guarantees? That meets compliance requirements around logging calls?
Bloomberg might come the closest on this. Why don't you go out and price a Bloomberg terminal for yourself, at the grade that lets you trade options with other Bloomberg terminal owners over the chat interface?
I dont like Trump but I'm interested in the idea of what technology we want our politicians to use if we actually want them to be functional teams. This seems like a topic that might be good to talk about on HN.
During the UK Covid-19 enquiry into gov decision making at that time it came to light that most of the UK cabinet were co-ordinating via Whatsapp groups. Again, I'm not a fan of Boris and Dom Cummings but this makes some sort of sense to me. I recognise the need for government teams to have quick convenient chat available to them. Things move too fast these days to wait for the next cabinet meeting or to arrange things via a series of phone calls.
Similarly we can look back to Obama having to fight to keep his Blackberry in 2009 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna28780205