U.S. Senate approves secure messaging app Signal for use by staffers

The U.S. Senate has approved the secure messaging app Signal for use by staffers. The approval was apparently granted back in March, but only came to light in a letter written by Sen. Ron Wyden.

In the letter, Wyden thanks Sergeant at Arms Frank Larkin for the ‘recent announcement by your office that end-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal is approved for Senate staff use.’

ZDNet notes that the Democrat senator is a well-known advocate of privacy and encryption, and that the move follows an earlier security step.

The news comes just a week after the Senate’s move to switch every page on its domain to HTTPS by default, a long-awaited upgrade that took more than a year to complete.

It was also in March that careless wording by Wikileaks led some to believe that Signal, WhatsApp and iMessages had been compromised by the CIA. In fact, what Wikileaks was saying was that end-to-end encryption cannot protect messages if the device itself is compromised, which would be true no matter what app was used.

Apple quickly moved to say that ‘many’ of the CIA exploits were patched prior to their public release.

Signal is a free download from iTunes.