Wire to Replace Signal as Standard in the Bundestag

Germany’s parliament is trying a messenger makeover, with Bundestag President Julia Klöckner urging lawmakers to move from Signal and other big-name chat apps to Wire, a service the parliament already offers internally. The official pitch is simple: it has approval from Germany’s federal security office, hides personal phone numbers, and is supposed to make phishing scams harder after recent attacks hit politicians. In plain English, the idea is to stop MPs getting tricked through their messaging apps.

But the comment section? Absolutely not prepared to clap politely. One early commenter casually dropped the ultimate insider flex, saying they worked on getting Wire certified for the German government and even helped build systems that could run totally cut off from the internet — only to finish with the wonderfully bleak Berlin joke that once you arrive, “you can never leave.” Others were far less sentimental. The hottest criticism was that lawmakers are just swapping one kind of lock-in for another: goodbye Signal, hello Wire, and somehow Europe’s beloved open alternative, Matrix, is still standing outside in the rain.

Then came the classic internet eye-roll: if the real problem is people getting fooled, why act like changing apps magically fixes human behavior? One commenter delivered the line of the thread, saying every time you make something idiot-proof, the universe invents a better idiot. Another simply called ditching Signal over phishing fears “very odd.” Translation: the public is split between “fair enough” and “this solves the wrong problem.”