United States Senate Approves Secure Messaging App Signal for Staffer Use, Moves All Sites to HTTPS. Zach Whittaker, ZDNet, reporting on a recent letter by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), relayed to Senate staffers by the Sergeant at Arms. From the letter itself:

I [Senator Wyden] have long argued that strong, backdoor-free encryption is an important cybersecurity technology that the government should be embracing, not seeking to regulate or outlaw. My own Senate website, which has used HTTPS by default since 2015, was the first Senate website to do so. With the transition to default HTTPS for all of the other Senate websites and the recent announcement by your office that end-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal is approved for Senate use, I am happy to see that you too recognize the important defensive cybersecurity role that encryption can play.

The news comes only a week after the United States Senate announced it had switched all sites over to HTTPS. No small feat, considering the senate.gov domain hosts hundreds of senator’s domains and committee sites.

Tuesday, 16 May 2017