I decompiled the White House's new app

colesantiago

This is a pretty standard decomplation of an Android app. I am sure if you decompile other apps used by hundreds of thousands of people, you would find all sorts of tracking in there. Thanks for helping the White House improve their app security for free though.

Arainach

"An official United States government app is injecting CSS and JavaScript into third-party websites to strip away their cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login gates, and paywalls." In their defense, this is the first thing the Trump admin has done that's unambiguously positive for ordinary people.

oefrha

> An official United States government app is injecting CSS and JavaScript into third-party websites to strip away their cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login gates, and paywalls. Giving people a taste of web with Ublock Origin annoyance filters applied, refreshing. Can’t believe orange man regime is doing one thing right.

somehnguy

Interesting. The site is nearly unusable to me unfortunately. '19 MBP w/ Chrome - scrolling stutters really bad

vineyardmike

> The official White House Android app has a cookie/paywall bypass injector, tracks your GPS every 4.5 minutes (9.5m when in background), and loads JavaScript from some guy's GitHub Pages (“lonelycpp” is acct, loads iframe viewer page). Doesn’t seem too crazy for a generic react native app but of course coming from the official US government, it’s pretty wide open to supply chain attacks. Oh and no one should be continually giving the government their location. Pretty crazy that the official government is injecting JavaScript into web views to override the cookie banners and consent forms - it is often part of providing legal consent to the website TOS. But legal consent is not their strong suit I guess.

SoftTalker

Looks like what you might expect in a standard marketing app from a consultancy. They probably hired someone to develop it, that shop used their standard app architecure which includes location tracking code and the other stuff.

sitzkrieg

i assumed it was malware out the gate. yep

trimethylpurine

I don't see what the fuss is about. This all looks pretty standard. I use random people's stuff all the time. Isn't that the point of open source? Did you find something malicious in the random GitHub repo? If so, you should write an article about that instead.

r4indeer

The argument regarding no certificate pinning seems to miss that just because I might be on a network that MITM's TLS traffic doesn't mean my device trusts the random CA used by the proxy. I'd just get a TLS error, right?

replwoacause

lol honestly all of this tracks given the current administration. i'm actually surprised it isn't worse. but yeah, amateur hour for sure.

ThaFresh

nice work, so they can get your location and have ICE scoop you up if required

iancarroll

A bit skeptical of how this article is written as it seems to be mostly written by AI. Out of curiosity, I downloaded the app and it doesn't request location permissions anywhere, despite the claims in the article. I've noticed Claude Code is happy to decompile APKs for you but isn't very good at doing reachability analysis or figuring out complex control flows. It will treat completely dead code as important as a commonly invoked function.

post-it

> An official United States government app is injecting CSS and JavaScript into third-party websites to strip away their cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login gates, and paywalls. Rare Trump administration W. I'm assuming there's one particular website they open in the app that shows a cookie popup, and this was a dev's heavy-handed way of making that go away.

longislandguido

The comments in here are pretty rich. If this was any other app, everyone would be screaming about "why are you being mean to the author", flagging posts left and right.

andix

I would've expected worse. :)

somebudyelse

The only permissions on the play store are notifications. On data privacy, it only shows optional email or phone number. Respectfully, I call BS.

nine_k

> An official United States government app is injecting CSS and JavaScript into third-party websites to strip away their cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login gates, and paywalls. So at least it does something actually beneficial for the user! I wish it could go even further, the way Reader Mode in a browser would go.

jruz

Is this a surprise to anyone?

ranzhh

Are those references to 45 and 47 "Easter Eggs" to Trump's presidency number(s)? As in, forty-five-press (45th president) and Version 47.x.x (47th president), as well as the text message hotline (45470).

analog31

>>> This is a government app loading code from a random person's GitHub Pages. A random person with pronouns, no less. That means the code is “woke.”