A photograph of Trump administration official Mike Waltz’s phone shows him using an unofficial version of Signal designed to archive messages during a cabinet meeting.
Mike Waltz, who was until Thursday U.S. National Security Advisor, has inadvertently revealed he is using an obscure and unofficial version of Signal that is designed to archive messages, raising questions about what classification of information officials are discussing on the app and how that data is being secured, 404 Media has found.
On Thursday Reuters published a photograph of Waltz checking his mobile phone during a cabinet meeting held by Donald Trump.
The screen appears to show messages from various top level government officials, including JD Vance, Tulsi Gabbard, and Marco Rubio.
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007321231-Archiving-or-unarchiving-chats
Am I just being dense or does stock Signal already have this feature?
You can also export the entirety of your Signal chats and decrypt them on a computer with an open source tool.
I also thought they were using Signal specifically to avoid FOIA, which requires government officials to archive their messages.
So it is possible government officials are using disappearing messages in Signal (which is illegal for multiple reasons), which will give a reason to use a third party app, not that this specific app should be trusted in any way.
My understanding is that Archiving chats would be keeping a copy of these chats accessible elsewhere for archiving purposes and not directly related to the archiving feature you’ve mentioned.
Signal does support chat backup which is close enough but its encrypted and its complicated to make one (for security reasons) and I am not sure its possible to view the encrypted chats without going through the process of restoring the backup.
There are third party, open source tools to view encrypted Signal backups if you have the key to decrypt them.