Signal has been around since the first Trump admin (I’ve been using it longer than that) and I’ve been told that WhatsApp copied Signal’s encryption.
Signal uses excellent encryption. But it’s only “end to end”. It’s just an encrypted texting app. The phone on each end of the message is insecure, and we’ve seen lots of national-espionage-level phone hacks. Anyone who has access to you phone can read your signal messages. (Including backdoor access that monitors your phone.) The address book is obviously insecure. And who hasn’t sometimes texted the wrong person? And of course it violates record retention laws.
After repeated assertions from the admin that nothing in this chat was classified, The Atlantic released the whole thing except for the name of the CIA officer.
I’ve been seeing a good amount of pushback is that it’s all a hoax by the Democrats.
Some Deep State Democratic staffer must have had access to a phone and invited a known registered Democrat whose wife donated to Democrats. This is all because Biden had terrible White House security. Obviously Hegseth and others aren’t going to use government channels, because those can be FOIA’d and the courts have been weaponized against Republicans.
If the admin goes after the Atlantic for publishing the signal chat, does the current SCOTUS uphold NYT vs US? The Pentagon Papers ruling was only 6-3.
Yeah, we’ve already seen Israel hacking cellphones. Surely every major government intelligence organization is doing that, including the US, China, and Russia. The Houthis don’t have a major intelligence org, and i can’t see Russia or China showing their cards by warning the Houthis. But…
What i wonder is, if they didn’t want a record of their conversation, why didn’t they just gather in a secure room? I heard someplace (npr?) that most of the people in that chat have access to such rooms both at work and in their homes.
They wanted updates and they weren’t in a common location.
I think it’s actually reasonable that they’d want a secure text messaging app for real-time updates or quick, ad hoc exchanges while they focus on their tasks du jour.
I’m kind of surprised there isn’t an internal app for that.
I strongly suspect that there is. They aren’t using Signal for security, they are using it because it deletes the messages after a certain amount of time so they can’t be subpoenaed or FOIAd. Which again is illegal.
And, speaking as a signal user, that’s not the default. The default is to keep everything. You need to specifically configure it to delete old messages.
I’m not in a position to actually know, but it’s very, very easy for me to imagine that the secure options are cumbersome to use, would be painful-to-impossible to establish group chats in, might have extra bureaucracy to enforce classifications, etc.
Maybe addressing this would be a better job for Elmo than DOGE.
I have no idea about ease of use, but i bet there is the equivalent of the cheap fast effective triad. You want quick and easy, don’t share classified stuff. They had to work hard to get classified stuff into their phones. You can’t take your phone in a SCIF, and you aren’t supposed to take stuff out. You need helpers to handle the admin burden, hire them.
It is at the least careless, at the worst, deliberate obfuscation and disregard of classified material. This is not as simple as “new phone who dis?”
