After hearing how poor the IT infrastructure in the British government is, I got wondering if it was time for them to implement a better solution than people running amuk on WhatsApp because there are no better options.
The obvious answer is to run Matrix instances, one for each government department like the French do. They’ve even made the app they developed open source and the German Ministry of Defence have been inspired by that to create their own app, with the idea being that it could then be rolled out to the rest of the government.
It wouldn’t be too difficult for the British government to use existing solutions, perhaps adapted to their own circumstances. Perhaps with message histories getting saved so they can’t be conveniently “lost” and/or algorithms to flag up suspicious activity.
It needn’t stop there. With recent changes Xitter is no longer a useful platform for putting out official information. The Beeb are now on Mastodon, it is time something like that were used by MPs.
I’d be up for the idea that MPs get issued with a secure phone that contains only the apps vital for conducting political business and it could be made a offence to use your own devices for anything other than personal reasons.
It wouldn’t stop all the shenanigans but it’d certainly go a long way to laying the foundations for a better political IT system and one that could largely be done in-house.
Anyway, just a few rambling thoughts brought on by recent events.
MPs using whatsapp and other encrypted messaging apps is intentional, regardless of the quality of IT infrastructure. They don’t want their records arbitrarily available for inspection (and inspected they should be).
For example boris johnson if i remember correctly “losing his phone in the sea”? so a number of messages became inaccessible
Precisely this. WhatsApp is used as it’s the easiest off-the-record way for dodgy communications to happen.