Could be because someone in this group is a spy?
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Even though I trust Signal and the FBI has raided them multiple times without success. This is still a centralised service that goes through American servers therefore is automatically a threat to sovereignty.
But again I cannot recommend signal enough they have a brilliant track record. And with good opsec you have little to worry about.
Anyone wana give the tl:dr?
Why?
The decision was made according to the report after the Commission became aware of the group's existence last month and deemed the risk of compromise too high. While there is no evidence yet that communication has actually been intercepted, the threat situation has escalated.
So... Not because "that's a privacy tool, conducting public business there is antidemocratic".
Instead because, "look at how those Americans use it wrongly, we don't want to be like them."
. . .
Huh. I have mixed feelings about this.
No not really. More a "its not the right tool for the job" signal is a messenger for private use, EU is working on / has a matrix based messenger that is more suited.
You still want encryption but also central user management etc. (Which hopefully also includes archiving...).
Sounds like a decentralized encrypted messaging platform is needed.
And when you need the highest trust, you just need to make sure you and the people you are talking to are all on trusted servers.
so governments would use their own gov.eu server or something, and only communicate sensitive info to others on that network so the info never leaves that server
Yes. Something they are working on based on Matrix ;)
Sounds great, I didn't know about that
https://www.euractiv.com/news/commission-trials-european-open-source-communications-software/
I read this article earlier this year. Lets see, what comes out of it!
Sounds like a decentralized encrypted messaging platform is needed.
Decentralized probably isn't desirable for this use case; self-hosted is. When designing something for that purpose based on a decentralized protocol like Matrix, it's probably desirable to mandate that the most sensitive conversations take place using a server with decentralization disabled and a client restricted to using only that server.
Banning it at-home, is 1 thing, but banning it while abroad & in hostile-regimes, would be idiocy: at the home-end, record the whole interaction, & make that part of official-record.
But make it impossible for the hostile-regime to get anything from either the in-their-country device, or the encrypted stream which they can't crack.
the fact that corruption wants nonaccountability is 1 valid concern.
but the fact that hostile-regimes exist, & we're in economic-meshing with them, means that we need to be able to have officials in those countries.
Which makes the requirement for communications which the hostile-regime can't crack real.
Oversimplificaiton is incompetent "management".
Don't solve the wrong problem, & pretend that you aren't responsible for the authority you mis-wielded.
That they were having a non-accountable-within-the-EU group on Signal, that IS AN ACTUAL PROBLEM, but there are use-cases for Signal to be needed, if done properly.
_ /\ _
*for internal communication
The EU Commission is cracking down harder on digital espionage. It has instructed its highest-ranking officials to immediately dissolve a central Signal group for internal communication. According to Politico, department heads and their deputies are primarily affected by this measure. The order stems from fears that the chat group may have become the target of targeted cyberattacks.
I assume it is to prevent this mess
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_government_group_chat_leaks
The article did reference the Signal chat leak. It's also worth noting that Signal is secure, its just also available to the public and not designed for officials only. Cryptography is useless if the device itself is compromised or if someone is added to a chat. I assume they're making people use an internal system that only officials have accounts on. That way you can accidentally add a journalist or impersonator to the chat.
While Signal is still considered one of the most secure options, security ends when the end device itself is compromised. If an attacker gains control of the smartphone, even the best end-to-end encryption is of little use: chats and images can then be read directly on the device. However, Herpig emphasizes that there are currently few better alternatives to encrypted messengers like Signal or Threema.
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