[_heimdall]

It seems reasonable enough that the government may have built a forked version of signal with message archiving that meets documentation requirements.

If its an app they wanted kept under wraps, it will make the while Hegseth situation seem a lot more benign.

I use Molly Messenger on a secondary phone that doesn't have a SIM, its a fork of Signal with a few differences related to encryption at rest. It still works with normal signal users just fine, on the other end you can't tell I have a different client. If the government has a similarly forked version you could likely still accidentally invite the wrong user in from their normal Signal app and they wouldn't know you're on a forked version with government archiving features.

[sumeno]

It was not built by the government and it's not some secret software, it's off the shelf software by an Israeli company.

[_heimdall]

I didn't catch this in the article here. Is that well known elsewhere?

[sumeno]

> But the message is slightly different: it asks Waltz to verify his “TM SGNL PIN.” This is not the message that is displayed on an official version of Signal.

> Instead TM SGNL appears to refer to a piece of software from a company called TeleMessage which makes clones of popular messaging apps but adds an archiving capability to each of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeleMessage

[UnreachableCode]

Acquired by a US company, Smarsh, according to other comments

[poink]

It's not only reasonable the US government should be archiving communications between officials, it should be compulsory. We've already had problems with this re: agents of government agencies like CBP and big bankers using E2EE messaging apps to skirt regulatory requirements.

That said, whether this makes the situation better or worse depends on who can actually see these archives. "Smarsh" is a US-based company, but they acquired TeleMessage, which was (is?) based in Israel.

[dmix]

Some of the top US government IT contractors are British, Canadian, and Italian owned companies. Running servers in the US for a government contract isn’t a big deal at a technical level.

[UnreachableCode]

> If the government has a similarly forked version you could likely still accidentally invite the wrong user in from their normal Signal app and they wouldn't know you're on a forked version with government archiving features.

Is there no way Signal can prevent this in the official app?

[FreakyT]

Molly is great; I use it for the same purpose.

I find the Signal devs' attitude so frustrating; they deliberately disable the ability to use Signal in secondary device mode for phone-sized-devices, because they know the Correct Way To Use Signal™ is to only use it on one phone-sized-device.

[firesteelrain]

6 days ago there was the Hegseth article regarding this being hotly debated in here and it’s a great example of not having all the facts before jumping to conclusions. Part of the debate was regarding archiving of messages which now apparently there is a way to archive Signal messages automatically. Huh who would have figured

[ceejayoz]

Great motivated thinking, but wrong.

It would appear they're using this app now, post-incident, because they got in trouble. (And having messages with Vance, Gabbard, etc. be visible to the press pool camera is... not a great look for the guy who accidentally added a reporter.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/us/politics/cia-director-...

> All of the messages from a leaked group chat have been deleted from the phone of John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, the agency said in a court filing.

[chrisco255]

Those are just accusations from a 3rd party agency. They have no way of knowing if Ratcliffe archived the messages before deleting. Signal has been approved since the Biden admin. It was most likely already distributed with the Telemessage feature.

[ceejayoz]

“the agency said in a court filing”

The agency is the CIA, to a court, saying the messages are gone.

[UnreachableCode]

> Signal has been approved since the Biden admin. It was most likely already distributed with the Telemessage feature.

How do you know this? Also I would not consider this a “feature”. We should assume they’re different apps, insofar as Telemessage can add whatever they please to the source

[firesteelrain]

"One of the things I was briefed on very early … was by the CIA records management folks about the use of Signal as a permissible work use," Ratcliffe said during a March 25 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing (see 45:05). "It is. That is a practice that preceded the current administration to the Biden administration."

https://www.c-span.org/program/senate-committee/dni-director...

[ceejayoz]

Exhaling air through flappy mouth and throat parts is also permissible in the CIA.

That doesn’t mean you won’t get in trouble if you flap them in a way that says “we bomb x at y o’clock” where uncleared people can hear.