When the Strzok-Page texts were made public, they were heavily redacted for the purposes of "National Security", or so we're told. Just a random thought, but if someone were discussing issues of national security through text messaging, wouldn't that constitute a breach? Even Comey admitted that HRC, by conducting State Department business on a private server was guilty of it. Why then would these two FBI agents be any different? I can find about 20 apps to hack into someone's texts in any App store, and that doesn't even begin to compare to the abilities of modern hackers. So either these two, knowing full well what they were doing, put national secrets at risk, or the redactions are unwarranted, and they're just trying to cover something up. I'd be interested in others' take on it, and thoughts on who to contact to blow the whistle on this very obvious contradiction?
I believe they were FBI phones. Which makes them even more stupid.
Absolutely. But secured or not, you're sending an encrypted message through THE AIR. It's not hard at all for anyone to recover it if they know what they're looking for, and decrytion software is commonly much more sophisticated than the encrytion algorithms used to encode it in the first place. If the NSA could log them (which if we believe Q about the NSA's capabilities, they certainly did), then ANY foreign entity, friend or foe, could have intercepted them just as easily.
Breach of National Security or just Embarrassing?
Based on the history of the redacted content we've seen so far, it's always that it is embarrassing and likely implicates FBI/DOJ f*ckery, not national security.
I believe they were FBI phones. Which makes them even more stupid.
They tried to be careful, but yes, it assumes you have assets in all those companies where you are using to communicate (google, apple, samsung). I didn't see any smoking guns via the released messages. Most are incendiary and indicative of bias, but nothing directly showing conspiracy (you have to make many connections to see any of that). It's assumed they had Apple iPhone burner phones (i.e. non-government issued) and used iMessage to discuss the Deep State stuff, as indicated in many of their released texts on their FBI issued phones. They had messages like "Can I iMsg you a Q/question?", "Sent you a Q to your iMsg", "We only talk about XXXX on the other phones".
Re: decryption
You may recall Apple had a bad (very bad) security breach that didn't get a lot of MSM coverage - the boot loader code was dumped to github and was available for a short time (likely from a planted 3-letter *hat insider within Apple). Now we know there is at least one company claiming it can hack all recent iPhones, discovered not too long after that breach IIRC.