- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
I’ve been using Threema for a while now. Got my family to move but most people don’t want to pay for it (it’s like 2 €) so I got like 16 contacts…
Haven’t looked at the different alternatives sponsored by European governments.
Are they actually E2E or is there a way for the government to finally have their long wanted backdoor implemented to snoop onto civilian communication?- A lot of the solutions are based on standards that already include E2E. The French and German platforms for example are just rebranded Matrix.
- the platforms are not intended for civilian communication. The video is a bit misleading when it talks about WhatsApp alternatives. A more accurate description would be “Slack alternative”: A communications platform for government workers to message each other, so that potentially sensitive data isn’t stored on 3rd party servers.
the belgium one is also clearly based on matrix from the screenshots https://beam.belgium.be/en/
I don’t quite get why they need to rebrand these things. I have my own Nextcloud instance, as well as my own Matrix instance. I don’t go all “IT’S LEONDRIVE AND LEONCHAT” because that’s really silly.
Hope they also have people contributing upstream.
Not only Slack - it is likely also a replacement for Signal. Even if Signal isn’t a US entity, it is still hosted outside of the EU.
Sure, technically it’s a replacement for a bunch of services. But from a institutional perspective you wouldn’t use Signal in the first place, just like you wouldn’t use WhatsApp. You want closed (as in no open participation not as closed source) systems where only employees can send messages in the first place. Traditionally you would use Slack or MS Teams for that.
That doesn’t mean that your employees wouldn’t use WhatsApp or Signal anyway and having a convenient alternative might curb that use.
Maybe you wouldn’t use Signal…
But what if you wanted really tight OpSec like the US DoD?







