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House Democratic committee moves to encrypted messaging for internal communications

House Democratic committee moves to encrypted messaging for internal communications

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Following last year’s extensive hack

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Following last year’s hack, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has switched to encrypted messaging app Wickr for all internal communications, as reported by BuzzFeed.

Installed by the DCCC in June, Wickr provides end-to-end encryption for messaging, similar to WhatsApp and iMessage. The DCCC is the first party committee to use Wickr, although Republicans in the White House have adopted a similar app called Confide, according to a report earlier this year, raising records retention concerns.

Wickr gives users the option to automatically delete messages after a given period of time, an option that has proven useful to a number of groups. In one case last year, Uber used the app to communicate with the corporate research firm Ergo, making it impossible to recover records of the conversations, even under court order.

The DCCC was targeted by a hacking campaign last year, which saw thousands of documents stolen and then released, including the home addresses and phone numbers of many Democratic representatives.