Federal workers say they increasingly distrust platforms like Facebook

Privacy
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Given the recent impact of DOGE and rising mistrust of big tech companies , U.S. federal employees are now switching over to end-to-end encrypted messengers.

Multiple federal workers who spoke to The Verge on the condition of anonymity said they’ve moved sensitive conversations from text messages and Facebook Messenger to the encrypted messaging app Signal. Many are downloading and using Signal for the first time to communicate with each other — away from the eyes of Trump and Musk loyalists but also from mainstream tech companies. For some, everything but the most innocuous conversations have been moved. Photos of pets might stay on typical channels; almost everything else is on Signal.

“I have to have two separate conversations with someone over two different platforms,” says a person who works for the US Agency for International Development (USAID). “But that’s how wary people are of trusting their messages.”

Another federal employee told The Verge that peers have asked them not to contact them on platforms like Facebook Messenger and to move any conversations about work or the federal government to Signal. Civil servants said they fear that technology companies aligned with the Trump administration, like Meta, could turn over user information to the government. One worker said they feared their data across platforms could be fed into artificial intelligence tools that would then be used to identify people who disagree with the administration.

Additionally, these civil servants have been sharing basic opsec advice with each other.

On forums like r/fednews, users share security tips and warnings about how workers’ activities could be monitored. The Signal app offers end-to-end encrypted messages, meaning the company doesn’t retain or have access to messages. But that means a user’s security settings on their device are all the more important: users can set messages to disappear after a set amount of time and set up a username rather than connect with other people using a phone number.

Even on Signal, there’s heightened vigilance. Some federal employees have taken extra steps to shield their identities, like changing their display names to be anonymous, fearing someone could screenshot their messages. Signal did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether it has seen an increase in new users over the past several weeks. But according to data from Pew Research Center, as of November the federal government employed over 3 million people, or 1.87 percent of the entire US workforce.

To think that 10 years ago, most people weren’t even aware of apps like Signal or even cared to protect their digital privacy.

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I got my family converted to Signal about 9 years ago. :slight_smile:

I still haven’t got them to use encrypted email. :frowning:

It is amazing to me that anyone is still at the “increasingly distrust platforms like Facebook” stage. I would have thought most people, including Federal workers, would have passed that stage a long time ago.

But I guess my views are reinforced by lurking on forums like this one and I lose track of the fact that most people haven’t a clue about Internet privacy and/or security.

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Ironically, Facebook Messenger recently added E2EE by default, at least for 1-to-1 chats. Though, as with Whatsapp, you can’t really know there’s no backdoor as the apps are not open source.

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Even with that it’s still like basically Whatsapp for messenger so good for those who switched to Signal
I wish I could get more people prepared this way though even if it doesn’t affect my country.

The state of surveillance capitalism is real I tell you.

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I know this is preaching to the choir but people want to believe in state governments just about as much as we all want parent figures who will be benevolent forces keeping us safe from “baddies” and help us when times are tough.

As with parents, people fall into the delusion that humans have something special that other animals don’t. Although our prefrontal cortex enables us to cooperate well with other humans, and our storytelling has brought this to a global scale, we have to recognize that we are still imperfect beings and are all equally reliant on grey matter :brain:.

Networks of humans paired with pluralistic error correcting mechanisms do better, but we have to realize that everything from religion to science are simply methods to tell stories to understand our world and be effective agents for ourselves and others. When a small group ends up controlling the flow of information through these networks, it can incentivize a lot of half-truth storytelling and growing lines of systemic complexity all built on these stories.

My point being, most people are getting lied to and without proper education and personal experiences to know otherwise, people want to assume a likely enough narrative that provides convenience and an ideal. This is unfortunately what it takes to burst the public’s bubble to learn they need to educate thselves and stop praying to central systems (what I used to call empty turrets, now filled) to save them.

Nobody is safe unless everyone is safe.

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We can’t be sure especially since Meta lied about enabling E2EE encryption by default on Instagram. It isn’t enabled by default and is a deep-down hidden feature.

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Also, all metadata is public.

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It’s called metadata because Meta has it :laughing:

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on Messenger it is default.

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Australia has laws that mean we passed surveillance state a long time a go to a level that would shock ppl who live in places where media are normal and report on this stuff. It does actually impact ppl in other countries tho too.
So you just wouldn’t know it because we talk a big game about rights and freedoms and these laws are really fundamentally out of line with the majority of society and the culture on one level. But because they dont undestand what it actually means, they agree with them at the same time.
While I do like a lot of things about it in a day to day way here lol, it’s also a country built on lies and false narratives since it began, so its on brand behaviour.

Not only is there law that they can get into all our digital accounts, with an evidentiary bar that may as well not exist, plus they got a bit ridic and added in that they could access them 3 days before applying for the warrant (???)
“I suspect you may j-walk (any offence counts) so Im in your account now”
So for no reason at all, they can get into all your digital accounts because the company must comply with Australian law when asked
That legislation also says they can add, delete and alter data. So they could put evidence, remove something you might want to rely upon, write a death threat or buy some drugs or something as your account

The one fewer ppl focus on or know about is that telcos must copy and live monitor all our data. Laws to retain it have been a thing since 2015 (some also have managed to secure an exemption to encrypt that retained data), but it has gradually leveled up in ways not reported on to the point where those infrastructure companies must monitor it, to do that without interfering with the efficiency, they copy it all and make it available to be analysed like a live mirror.

So theyve also been obliged under law to introduce interception capabilities, but interception is actually unlawful, but hey the law doesnt technically conflict because it is just saying a capability. Not they should actually intercept (that was probs reserved for the extra special agencies). Until it wasnt and extended to criminal orgs more recently, so its a little off, but Ive run out of the energy to yell about it to the ppl lol. If you ask an average person about this, they don’t actually care, because the media dont report on what it really means.

Further, companies like reddit is my current irritation because I cant get on anymore with a VPN no matter what tricks which is new. Cause for a while everyone was concerned about China and reddit. But theres a different legal issue. Under the mutual legal assistance treaty system, one country directs a request to the jurisdiction where that company is headquartered, nothing to do with shares ownership or where the servers are.

Reddit is headquartered in the US, which you might think is good, but Australia has a CLOUD Act agreement with the US which means our law enforcement can go direct to the company and apply our evidentiary bar for like everything or anything content level and that standard is very fcking low.

This is relevant to others because other countries can piggy back off it to evade the better laws they might have in their country, like particularly 5 eyes. As an autistic lawyer I ofcourse scrape all the daily lists and certain news and been strange amount of transnational organised crime operations going down. That normally involving way wider than 5 eyes. It should be weird to ppl, that Australia, an objectively tiny irrelevant country to most of the world is always involved in these joint take downs.

Recently when we ran into the issue that interception being unlawful for them only want the capability there in case(?). The appeal made it to the high court on evidence inadmissibility. The response to that was very audacious. It was a fuck you to rights and I kid you not, a week after the high court granted special leave to appeal, there was a Bill in parliament saying “this information applying to specified warrants was obtained the way we were meant to do it and is retroactively validated” (then they had to amend the legislation becacuse they did a type on one of the reference numbers to those warrants)

Interfering with a case before the high court, and I guess any legitimacy to the legal system and heightening my confusion about society, but also my dog is just as happy to see me at the end of the day so sometimes you just go about your life lol

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It amazed me how bad AUS’s situation is. :hushed:

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This issue has regained some passion for me lately tbh & thats just as a matter of principle. Because Im noticing ppl are either consciously or unconsciously very often putting ourselves on a type of national high horse looking down when I see the way ppl are discussing ie the somewhat hectic events playing out in the US lol.

Like are you fucking kidding me mate, America just does this stuff loudly. How are you blind to your own, literally begging you to check yourself, cause we do it quietly and officially and make it law thats arguably much worse conceptually and even in reality in this context. To just remain at the bigger picture for a moment, we have so many examples of this that support it’s a deep cultural issue in a weird way across the board that we need to untangle.
Ie US guy might be calling himself King in public on the internet. Our last PM scomo actually managed to make that concept in real life and official in wring and law. The constitutional law that makes this possible I will exercise self control and not share. But no one knew, it came out a year later and when it did, they didnt care. He legally and officially essentially made himself the dictator. They didn’t care to a level that the political party he was on the way out of, didnt even throw him under the bus for completely ripping up the constitution I dont get it lol

So it is my admittedly bias view our situation is just as bad if not worse and we need to get off the high horse for a few reasons. The structural things that have been built into our reality, like zero digital privacy norms, capabilities now built into critical infrastructure like to enable interception, and just a lack of any accountability from journalists or politicians. It’s a harder thing to untangle almost. I do not expect every person to spend their limited down time trying to work through the huge complexity of our legislation, the increased complexity is intentional because it enables corruption.

But some of the features of this legislation are increasingly and very obviously dystopian AF or more accurately at a level of just being bat shit crazy, I’ll spare you my examples. But they just blew everyone’s possible cover story to plead ignorance with these things. Because with that element you either didn’t do your job because your sold us out or because you’re lazy and shit at your job, no other options. These type things are red flags ppl dont miss in those professions.

So the way ppl are putting themselves on a high horse of functioning democracy with real rights and completely blind to our own issues, think it’s going great, that it is more problematic in a way. I will work out how to channel this new passion more productively soon hopefully than these essays but this is who I am as a person apparently lol sorry