Comment: What private messengers are NOT intended for
When politicians chat via Signal, this is certainly – but still a completely wrong means of communication, says Sylvester Tremmel.
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“Signalgate” broke in the middle of work on the messenger test in the current issue of c't: high-ranking members of the US government had inadvertently passed on information about military operations to Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine. Goldberg had been accidentally invited to a Signal group with such content.
The fact that the US government uses Signal would only be a predicate for the messenger if the politicians involved were considered to have expertise in IT security. In any case, there was subsequently much discussion about the security of the messenger, which is not approved by the US government for such purposes. But even the most secure means of communication in the world doesn't help if you invite people into chats that need to be kept secret without any controls.
Completely inappropriate
It is also completely inappropriate for politicians to discuss military operations in Signal chats. The messenger is aimed at private users and is designed to protect the written word as well as a classic conversation. This includes confidentiality, but also forgetting what has been said and typed and the impossibility of proving that something has been said.
The chat group actually worked with “self-deleting” messages. Messenger then gradually discards older messages. And Jeffrey Goldberg cannot at least cryptographically prove what was written because good messengers like Signal offer “deniability”; their users can therefore cryptographically claim irrefutably that they did not transmit certain things. Such features serve to protect privacy and other personal freedoms. This is intended to give citizens rights of defense against the state.
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Duty of accountability
In a democracy, the state, its organs and representatives do not have such rights. On the contrary, they have a duty to be accountable! Messengers with a lot of privacy protection are therefore the completely wrong means of driving political decisions forward. Such discussions should not be automatically deleted, but documented, archived and, if possible, published on – –.
Politicians who want to keep chat histories secret, in which they were involved due to their office, have not understood their role in a constitutional state. Unfortunately, this also happens time and again on this side of the pond.
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(syt)
