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.
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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.
Yes it should.
BBC have already started testing it and I suspect it’s spearheading the eventual move. And it kind of makes sense, in that governments and large corporations are no longer beholden to tech companies for critical communications to its audience.
And it kind of makes sense, in that governments and large corporations are no longer beholden to tech companies for critical communications to its audience.
This is key, especially as there is concern that some state actors have undue influence over certain services (hence all the fuss over TikTok as well as general concern about our reliance on Chinese companies). The idea of network sovereignty keeps coming up. Working with established open source solutions that can be largely implemented in-house is going to be key for governments going forward.
Yeah sure, but they’d farm the contracts out to their mates, it would cost billions of pounds, and then it would fail to work.
The government’s public-facing tech (gov.uk & related systems) is actually pretty world-leading and done in-house for a not extortionate amount, so it may be possible to form teams under the same organisation to develop internal software
That said though, those in government probably want to keep stuff under the table with WhatsApp and so probably would spend billions on contractors owned by their mates only to claim it’s too expensive when it’s nearly complete and scrap the whole thing, ideally with high cancellation payouts (this was the plan all along to look like they tried to do something while keeping the status quo)
And that’s why we can’t have nice things.
I guess most of us are here because we’re fairly IT literate and or inquisitive enough to learn. What you’re describing makes sense on a technology level to us but it’s missing the key ingredient that going to make it work for the government… the human ability for incompetence, exacerbated by British hubris, made worse by multinational IT consultancies having a stranglehold on UK government department IT. Ok that’s more than one missing ingredient 🤣.
The easiest thing to do would be to mandate MPs use separate phones. One for personal use one for government business. Great. What happens when they don’t? You’re going to have a large number of MPs that will simply say, “I am elected you are not I will only carry a single phone”. What do you do then? Mandate a work profile? Again, “I am a duly elected member of this parliament and I am not going to comply”. They’ll just swap personal numbers like they do now and continue to use private WhatsApp for government business. It will go on and on like that because they’ll just be belligerent for the sake of it. It’s the British way. Under those circumstances I simply can’t see educating MPs or civil servants on how to use a (let’s be honest) niche messaging app. People are inherently lazy and they’ll choose the path of least resistance even if that means weakening security and obfuscating government records. MPs don’t give a shit. Can you see MPs voting on strict controls for themselves? I can’t.
Let’s assume for a second that this does have by in from government. Every department has their own long running deals with US IT consultancies that aren’t simply going to allow these types of changes that undercut their bottom line. Who do think runs all the various IT systems in the UK government? Its not the Department For Information Computing & Technology (DICT) its several large consultancies (Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, JPMorgan, KPMG, Deloitte, etc etc). They’re not going to hold out their arms and welcome an in-house solution that under cuts their bottom line. Just ask GDS!
I’d love for what you’re suggesting to become a reality but we have enough difficulties getting public data from local councils in usable formats let alone trying to swing government departments to do anything useful.
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