Confide isn’t the first secure-communications app to find popularity among politicians and their aides. Signal, the gold standard of encrypted messaging and calling, is used by staffers who work for President Trump, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. But now the app has recently added optional features that allow messages to expire, which could bring up the same records-retention issues as Confide.
The popularity of encrypted communications apps has caught the attention of Congress. This week, two members of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology—including its chairman—sent a letter to the inspector general of the Environmental Protection Agency, responding to reports that some of its employees were using encrypted-communication apps to discuss how they’d respond to certain actions from the Trump Administration. In the letter, the representatives wrote that the practice may “run afoul of federal record-keeping requirements” and shield important information from Freedom of Information Act requests or congressional inquiries.
Since the EPA is a federal agency, its records are subject to the Federal Records Act, not the Presidential Records Act. But the requirements are essentially the same.
A document published by the National Archives and Records Administration in 2015 clarifies guidance for how to manage electronic records other than email: Google chat, Skype, iMessage and SMS, Twitter direct messages, and Slack, to name a few. According to the document, these messages are federal records, and must be treated as such. Depending on the nature of the messages, they may need to be kept either temporarily or permanently. That includes official business conducted over personal accounts, the document says.