EPA Employees Are Using Encryption Technology To Hide Resistance To Trump — But Is It Legal?
By Mike Bastasch, Daily Caller, Feb. 2, 2017
Federal employees are turning to encryption technologies to coordinate their resistance to the Trump administration, looking for ways to protect their conversations from hackers or agency overlords.
A small group of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) employees are already “communicating incognito using the app Signal shortly after Trump’s inauguration,” Politico reports. Such apps encrypt communications and make them difficult to monitor or hack.
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Federal law requires agency employees to preserve work-related records on government servers, even if such communications occur over non-government emails, phones or text messages.
Encrypting messages allow employees to create potentially work-related messages as ones they can control. That creates the possibility employees could use encryption to circumvent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
Read more here.