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The recent incident involving the inadvertent inclusion of a journalist into a Signal group chat where US officials discussed sensitive military operations highlights the complexities governments face when using consumer messaging applications for official communications. Historically, various government administrations have used commercial messaging apps for official purposes. For example, Boris Johnson’s administration, and Macron’s team before France chose to standardise on Element.

Kudos to The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) which has produced an excellent report into the use of consumer messaging apps within the Australian government. Based on a survey of 22 government agencies, it is one of the few quantitative research papers addressing the issue.

We believe in the power of open source. The transparency it requires builds trust, especially in terms of creating secure communication software. But we also understand that not every company can open-source its code. That’s why we have created our Build subscription: providing numerous nifty benefits including a commercial license that lets you develop proprietary products on Matrix while supporting the ecosystem that makes your innovation possible.

The Swedish Armed Forces (Försvarsmakten) has announced it will standardise on Signal for all non-classified communications via mobile devices. Signal has a strong security posture, encompassing end-to-end encryption, minimal metadata, and other privacy-preserving features. The decision underscores an ongoing shift among military and government entities worldwide towards adopting end-to-end encrypted communication solutions to protect unclassified yet sensitive exchanges.

The German Federal Office for Information Security clearly states that it is good security practice to update software as soon as possible when there are new fixes published by the software manufacturer. Similarly, the Cyber Resilience Act in section 56 states: “One of the most important measures for users to take in order to protect their products with digital elements from cyberattacks is to install the latest available security updates as soon as possible.”

I recently participated in discussions at Open Forum Europe’s EU Open Source Policy Summit, FOSDEM and Open UK’s State of Open conference. All of these discussions touched on how governments and open source vendors need to work together and, specifically, how public sector organisations can help fund open source development.

Since launching Synapse Pro to support nation-scale Matrix deployments, we’ve had a lot of questions asking how it differs from vanilla “community” AGPL Synapse. We held back a bit on the details because Synapse Pro is evolving rapidly with optimisations for scalability and availability in many different areas, so we wanted to wait before publishing quantified comparisons.

It feels as though 2024 was a year that highlighted the need for a new era of communications. To cite just a few examples, Russia intercepted German military discussions about providing Taurus missiles to Ukraine through a security lapse during a WebEx video conference call. A weakness exploited through a lack of interoperability between systems, and reliance on the unencrypted phone network to bridge the gap.

By now you’d assume most government organisations are aware of the risks associated with consumer messaging apps like WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram being used in the workplace. Consumer apps, convenient for personal use, are completely unsuited for official communications. They lack the necessary security, auditability and management controls that public sector organisations require.

We’re incredibly proud to announce the launch of Synapse Pro, a new enterprise Matrix server from Element that delivers phenomenal efficiencies for large-scale Matrix deployments in the public sector. Synapse Pro is Element’s best practice Matrix homeserver for huge public sector deployments.