I’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.
> 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.
I think there's also a fundamental misunderstanding on how many of these organizations work.
When I worked with the Feds (DOJ), we documented out many "what if" or contingency scenarios. They ranged from "effectively impossible" to "absolutely happening" on one axis and irrelevant to omgwtf on another. My terminology, not official ;) But we were encouraged to explore situations and scenarios and think out the likelihood, implications, relevant existing policies, potential responses under those policies, what new policies would make sense, etc. For the most part, these are creative/exploration exercises but sometimes they're deadly serious and will drive policy going forward. You don't always know at the time.
Fast forward 5, 10 or 20 years and something similar happens. Suddenly someone who happens to remember the report or get creative searching archives screams "OMG! THERE WAS A REPORT YEARS AGO AND NO ONE LISTENED!"
Correct.. but it was never a proposal/plan, just an evaluation.
Unfortunately, understanding all of that requires nuance and perspective that doesn't fit in a headline and will be buried in policy wonk discussions. I suspect if you expose all of that and give it as much attention/credibility as fully baked proposals and policies, it will chill honest, internal assessments and debate.
> 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.
There's an existing mechanism in Parliamentary systems: cabinet confidentiality. All papers, records, minutes etc associated with the cabinet are held in high secrecy until a long period of time has passed. Australia holds them for 30 years unless they are otherwise active records.
It does as you say: allows ministers to talk openly amongst themselves in the highest governing body. So long as leaks are rare, it's an effective mechanism.
Also in two minds, having worked in the civil service before. There was a slight panic when it became understood that unpaid Slack didn’t actually delete messages beyond the latest 10k; as soon as you started paying they’d all be available. Not that there was anything definitively problematic, but it just would take one newspaper to request “all Slack messages from the day before the brexit vote” and suddenly there’d be problems with the public’s perception of civil service political neutrality.
Because to be honest, everyone is political in some form or another, especially the people that effectively take a pay cut to work in the civil service because they want to help citizens, and it’s a daily challenge to keep that political nature from spilling out into your work.
Everyone needs a place to unburden, and if you’re legally forbidden from doing that with friends and family you rely on the workplace. In the end the best I could do was make a FOIA reaction emoji to remind people to tone it down if something could be perceived in the wrong way by the press.
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.
We have a media who will not give anyone the benefit of the doubt and actively seek to take sentences out of context to whip up controversy and get a few more clicks from the baying public.
I fully agree about transparency in government, but it was the public that decided that candid conversations were fair game for attacking not just politicians and officials, but anyone.
There are at least partial solutions such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_House_Rule but they rely on the good faith of the attendees, that's not something you can take for granted when tabloid journalists are present.
The real solution is to dilute political power further not by eliminating it but expanding it.
There’s game theory to back up the idea of a balancing act by making everyone police.
Personally I’d prefer expansion of representatives (in the US, but it’s not too hard to translate to UK) and/or judiciary.
In the case of the judiciary, technology could be applied transparently via open source models of building case management, looking for patterns, weighting their correctness by social means....
But of course we’ll keep wanking memes from ancient history
British government has transparency problem at much higher level. There is official report from investigation of rape gangs. It includes almost 100k child rape victims in many cities over 3 decades. Government refuses to release it, and pretends this abuse does not exists.
The source of the leaked communications would be another MP, as presumably no one else would have access. That means enforcing such a rule would create a parliamentary privilege debacle.
And since this is a non-recorded communication, about non-secret matters, how do determine if anyone actually broke the rule or not? There will never be evidence to back up an accusation, unless someone admits to it for some reason.
- 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.
In the Netherlands (probably more similar laws compared to the UK due to EU influence) you can make a request for all written communications regarding a specific decision by a government agency. That would include the emails about it.
I think it's rather sleazy of the UK government to implement a 90 day removal procedure, knowing that they can delay answering a request for longer than that. Totally not in the spirit of the FOI laws.
> 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:
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.)
I 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.
Incompetence 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)
For 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.
I 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.
It 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).
Private 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."
Private 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 :)
Tangentially, 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.
When 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...
Government 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.
> 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.
I 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.”
Re: 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?
I 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.
It'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.
I disagree entirely. Government must be conducted openly and with critical review by the people being governed, always. All government business should be logged and available for audit for years after the fact.
Otherwise, what we get is a totalitarian class society divided between 'those that know the secrets' and 'those that do not'.
Yes, 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.
[+] [-] dan-robertson|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Jestar342|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] caseysoftware|5 years ago|reply
When I worked with the Feds (DOJ), we documented out many "what if" or contingency scenarios. They ranged from "effectively impossible" to "absolutely happening" on one axis and irrelevant to omgwtf on another. My terminology, not official ;) But we were encouraged to explore situations and scenarios and think out the likelihood, implications, relevant existing policies, potential responses under those policies, what new policies would make sense, etc. For the most part, these are creative/exploration exercises but sometimes they're deadly serious and will drive policy going forward. You don't always know at the time.
Fast forward 5, 10 or 20 years and something similar happens. Suddenly someone who happens to remember the report or get creative searching archives screams "OMG! THERE WAS A REPORT YEARS AGO AND NO ONE LISTENED!"
Correct.. but it was never a proposal/plan, just an evaluation.
Unfortunately, understanding all of that requires nuance and perspective that doesn't fit in a headline and will be buried in policy wonk discussions. I suspect if you expose all of that and give it as much attention/credibility as fully baked proposals and policies, it will chill honest, internal assessments and debate.
[+] [-] jacques_chester|5 years ago|reply
There's an existing mechanism in Parliamentary systems: cabinet confidentiality. All papers, records, minutes etc associated with the cabinet are held in high secrecy until a long period of time has passed. Australia holds them for 30 years unless they are otherwise active records.
It does as you say: allows ministers to talk openly amongst themselves in the highest governing body. So long as leaks are rare, it's an effective mechanism.
[+] [-] heavenlyblue|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] robin_reala|5 years ago|reply
Because to be honest, everyone is political in some form or another, especially the people that effectively take a pay cut to work in the civil service because they want to help citizens, and it’s a daily challenge to keep that political nature from spilling out into your work.
Everyone needs a place to unburden, and if you’re legally forbidden from doing that with friends and family you rely on the workplace. In the end the best I could do was make a FOIA reaction emoji to remind people to tone it down if something could be perceived in the wrong way by the press.
[+] [-] goatinaboat|5 years ago|reply
We have a media who will not give anyone the benefit of the doubt and actively seek to take sentences out of context to whip up controversy and get a few more clicks from the baying public.
I fully agree about transparency in government, but it was the public that decided that candid conversations were fair game for attacking not just politicians and officials, but anyone.
There are at least partial solutions such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_House_Rule but they rely on the good faith of the attendees, that's not something you can take for granted when tabloid journalists are present.
[+] [-] solution882|5 years ago|reply
There’s game theory to back up the idea of a balancing act by making everyone police.
Personally I’d prefer expansion of representatives (in the US, but it’s not too hard to translate to UK) and/or judiciary.
In the case of the judiciary, technology could be applied transparently via open source models of building case management, looking for patterns, weighting their correctness by social means....
But of course we’ll keep wanking memes from ancient history
[+] [-] rewoi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nitwit005|5 years ago|reply
And since this is a non-recorded communication, about non-secret matters, how do determine if anyone actually broke the rule or not? There will never be evidence to back up an accusation, unless someone admits to it for some reason.
[+] [-] MaxBarraclough|5 years ago|reply
I agree that it's a fair concern. Another recent example: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jul/07/foreign-off...
[+] [-] IG_Semmelweiss|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tomhoward|5 years ago|reply
- 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.
[+] [-] t0mas88|5 years ago|reply
I think it's rather sleazy of the UK government to implement a 90 day removal procedure, knowing that they can delay answering a request for longer than that. Totally not in the spirit of the FOI laws.
[+] [-] pwc|5 years ago|reply
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_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.)
[+] [-] cheschire|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] afandian|5 years ago|reply
And for the large part it avoided the pitfalls of moving online. Current issue: https://www.private-eye.co.uk/current-issue
[+] [-] noir_lord|5 years ago|reply
Ian Hislop is a national treasure and his evidence to the select committee on press intrusion was both erudite and hilarious.
[+] [-] ballooney|5 years ago|reply
And it’s quite funny.
[+] [-] Bokanovsky|5 years ago|reply
If you're curious about it details are on Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Eye#Litigation
[+] [-] dazzawazza|5 years ago|reply
(this says a lot about the poor state of media in general).
[+] [-] johanek|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|5 years ago|reply
> 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/
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mellosouls|5 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] kees99|5 years ago|reply
Since when is Slack free software?
[+] [-] billme|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BiteCode_dev|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LatteLazy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] laumars|5 years ago|reply
Furthermore, it should be illegal for governments to use self-destructing messages.
[+] [-] tialaramex|5 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] fit2rule|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Frenchgeek|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sailfast|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pjc50|5 years ago|reply
And this particular government seems particularly untrustworthy at a particularly difficult time.
[+] [-] tarkin2|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
Makes it hard to recommend Signal now.
As a Signal user, what do you think about Signal's recent development?
[+] [-] crtasm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bencollier49|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sevaris|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fit2rule|5 years ago|reply
Otherwise, what we get is a totalitarian class society divided between 'those that know the secrets' and 'those that do not'.
[+] [-] nabla9|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] subsubsub|5 years ago|reply
At least someone has some technical knowledge. Was a bit worried about them after their zoom screenshot debacle.
[+] [-] truculent|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emilfihlman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zajio1am|5 years ago|reply