Massive Presidential level Security FUBAR

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7bmBoOWEGY

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"Following is Aryn Conrad's essay written for North Carolina's main newspaper, an expanded version of the post that she so kindly permitted me to share with y'all recently. Here it is, preceded by a note to her FB friends:
So, those of you who know me well know I have a lot of anxiety about making anything I do public. But I've decided it's time to get over it. I apparently have things to say that people want to hear. So, I submitted an Op-Ed to the News & Observer tonight. I had been working on it for a bit--a little here, a little there--based off of a facebook post I wrote about a week ago. Anyway, here it is--don't know if they will pick it up or not, but at least I tried, for once.
Oh, the News & Observer is the main newspaper for North Carolina.
North Carolina Should Lead, Not Follow: What Hegseth's Betrayal Means for Our State
When my father began his Army assignment in Munich in the early 1960s, one of his first duties was to carry a pistol on helicopter missions over the Czechoslovakian border. His orders were clear: if they were shot down behind enemy lines, he was to kill the general he accompanied—a man who carried crucial knowledge of U.S. military plans and intelligence. My father later became the personal secretary to the head of Army Intelligence in Central Europe. His duties included distributing classified briefings to other intelligence officers. If you didn't have the password, you didn't get the briefing. That was the level of seriousness with which intelligence was handled.
His sister—my aunt—worked in the FBI, heading the steno pool at the San Diego field office. Her role was so sensitive that when she married, she had to resign. Her new husband had a cousin tenuously connected to organized crime, and that connection, however remote, meant she could no longer be entrusted with federal secrets.
That was the standard. That was the bar. Intelligence work was not a game. It demanded integrity, loyalty, and above all, accountability.
So when I read the reports about what Pete Hegseth did—what they're calling "SignalGate"—I was horrified. The idea that the Secretary of Defense would share real-time military communications in an unsecured group chat, without even being sure everyone in the chat was supposed to be there, is more than reckless. It is an affront to everyone who has ever served in or supported U.S. intelligence operations.
Hegseth and the others in that chat treated that sacrifice with reckless disregard and have refused to show any accountability. If my father were alive, it would have broken his heart. He would have expected consequences. Consequences are what ensure discipline. Consequences are what maintain trust.
But perhaps most disturbing to me, as a North Carolinian, is that our own Senator Thom Tillis cast the deciding vote that confirmed Hegseth. I remember the waffling, the uncertainty—he nearly voted no. He knew the risk. He knew Hegseth was a political actor, not a serious steward of a sensitive agency. But he folded. Maybe it was fear of a primary. Maybe it was pressure from above. But in the end, Tillis put politics over national security, and over the reputation of our state.
This matters, not just for veterans, or for people with family in intelligence, like mine. It matters because North Carolina should lead, not follow.
We are the crown jewel of the Southeast: from the Blue Ridge to the banks, from the universities to the farms. We are a state that knows how to build, how to grow, how to think. And our leaders should reflect that.
What happened with Hegseth is not just a failure of one man. It is a failure of those who enabled him. And it should matter to voters, because the next time a classified briefing is leaked, the consequences may not be contained to a chat. They might not just be embarrassing. They could be lethal.
Senator Tillis, you once seemed to understand that. But when the moment came to stand up, you didn’t. And North Carolina deserves better.
We deserve leaders who protect the Constitution, not just salute it. We deserve leaders who understand the gravity of national security, because they know the sacrifices of those who have worked in the military and in intelligence.
We deserve leaders who lead."

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxCudC1VBLI

[mister_coffee]

It just seems blindingly obvious that this crowd is badly out of their depth and will likely get a lot of Americans killed. Any whataboutisms some troll bleats about will not change that.

I'm just wondering how many foreign intelligence services from countries that have a beef with us (and at this point that is pretty much everybody) have penetrated the personal devices of senior people in this administration? Or for that matter of people who wield a lot of power but aren't officially in the administration? And having that inside information will be very powerful for our opponents if we get into a stupid (sorry, even more stupid) confrontation with China or Canada. They will likely play us like violins.

It also really stands out that Trump isn't really engaged at all on a critical issue like this and it sounds like he had no clue about it.

[Rideback]

Look at David's explanation. The phones were all vulnerable. The information fit all the criteria that the information was classified yet in a Senate hearing, under oath, Trump's team declared that the information was NOT CLASSIFIED. Only after that hearing, with those statements did the editor called their bluff by publishing the screen shots which demonstrated to the public that indeed the information was classified. Because he released the information after the attack he did not jeopardize the actual attack's outcome.

What was jeopardized was the attack in real time because hackers had access to the plans in time to put warnings and/or countermeasures in place which put our military in harm's way. The 2nd thing that was jeopardized was that the hackers now have access to these guys' phone numbers, their whole phone trees which translates into pretty much the whole of govt. Think about that. CentCom, Pentagon, Joint Chiefs, foreign assets, foreign govts, CIA assets in the field...names and contacts are now revealed to our enemies.

You can chortle over thinking this is all the Editor's fault but his revelations gave warnings not just to the public but to the people who were put into harm's way by the sheer stupidly arrogant actions of this gang who compromised all of us.

[dorankj]

You picked the least important thing and say it isn’t true B/C ONLY your sources are correct. The mission was successful and the Houthis were hit hard, maybe stopping them from impeading European trade mainly. The “journalist” better hope classified information wasn’t transmitted otherwise he’ll be willfully providing it and be charged on espionage charges and more. This will never amount to what you desperately want it to.

[Rideback]

Your version of owning this historic bumble is so sad. Yes, the guy mtg Putin was actually using his phone because he posted in the chat, Read David's post.

[dorankj]

Except the guy who was in Russia didn’t even take the phone that had the Signal talk. At least they didn’t get 13 service members killed and left billions in equipment behind for the enemy to use! Also no one was falling from the planes clinging to the landing gear. You cackling hyenas parroting the hate Trump media didn’t demand any heads to roll then so once again you’re utterly without principle or point.

[mister_coffee]

You don't compromise an app like signal by breaking the encryption. You compromise it by compromising an endpoint like some idiot's smartphone where he has installed Tiktok and Candy Crush as well.

Signal's protocols and encryption have been vetted by multiple credible people who know what they are doing and know what they are talking about. And who are independent third parties that have no dog in the fight. And Signal's primitives (e.g. Curve2559 and AES-256) are well-understood and accepted as very secure, at least until someone builds a practical quantum computer and maybe even then.

Elliptical Curve encryption is considered bombproof, and a general defeat of the algorithm involves finding a general solution to a well-studied class of partial differential equations that have been studied for almost two hundred years. Without finding a general solution.

I was bored and reading Signal's Wikipedia Page a few days ago and ran across this little gem (italics are mine):

In October 2014, researchers from Ruhr University Bochum (RUB) published an analysis of the Signal Protocol.[23] Among other findings, they presented an unknown key-share attack on the protocol, but in general, they found that it was secure.[153] In October 2016, researchers from UK's University of Oxford, Queensland University of Technology in Australia, and Canada's McMaster University published a formal analysis of the protocol.[154][155] They concluded that the protocol was cryptographically sound.[154][155] In July 2017, researchers from RUB found during another analysis of group messengers a purely theoretic attack against the group protocol of Signal: A user who knows the secret group ID of a group (due to having been a group member previously or stealing it from a member's device) can become a member of the group. Since the group ID cannot be guessed and such member changes are displayed to the remaining members, this attack is likely to be difficult to carry out without being detected.[156]

So, I don't know, if one of those dingbats left their phone at a hotel bar in Moscow someone could have figured out the chat group ID and added some third party to embarass them and see how they react...

[Jingles]

Totally agree this was a FUBAR. However, anyone that thinks any and all forms of social media aren't monitored has their heads buried in the sand, regardless of how encrypted it is supposed to be.

[just-jim]

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Next week’s New Yorker magazine cover.

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Well yes, they did it on purpose, just not for the reasons they're admitting to.

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On purpose. They did it on purpose, I'm tellin' ya.

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The Espionage Act clearly lays out how there is a duty to protect information
https://www.publicnotice.co/p/signalgat ... tz-hegseth

[mister_coffee]

The 2025 project directed that SIGNAL should be used.

Which tells this that these people are all more or less True Believers and that their political agenda is more important to them than national security. It also tells me that they don't really believe that any screwup like this is going to make any difference in their plans.

Their response to this scandal seems clumsy and amateurish to me. What I can't tell is if that is because they are clumsy amateurs or they just do not care and don't think how this is handled matters at all.

[Rideback]

The 2025 project directed that SIGNAL should be used.

[mister_coffee]

There is an old saying about when people don't know what to do they do what they know.

All of this is absolute gold-plated intel to any adversaries of this administration. It appears certain to me that somebody is going to exploit this intel (well, probably in practice everybody) and force them to dance to their music.

You get a few insights from this:

1. They are extremely lazy and sloppy about security.
2. There were some people on that chat who should have known better. Why they were there and apparently okay with it is an interesting question.
3. They seem to be much more interested in covering their personal asses when things go sideways than they do with fixing an actual problem.

The last one is real interesting because it tells me that if you caught one of these people in an indiscretion that would be publicly inconvenient they would likely be very easy to flip.

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TL Diaries:
"Alcoholic rapist Pete Hegseth is trying out his FOURTH defense for the Signal war plans group chat:
After "The group chat is a hoax by a discredited reporter!" didn't work...
And then "There was no Classified information discussed!" didn't work...
And then "There were no specific times or plans discussed!" didn't work...
He's now auditioning "We weren't discussing WAR plans, it was merely BATTLE plans!" to see if that works
(pro tip: it will not work)
Meanwhile, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz is claiming he's "never met, doesn't know, never communicated with" [reporter] Jeffrey Goldberg and "couldn't pick him out of a police lineup."
The attached photo is Waltz and Goldberg together at a small, private event at the French Embassy for the launch of French filmmaker Bernard-Henri Lévy's book and documentary "The Will to See" featuring a Q&A session that Jeffrey Goldberg moderated for the dozen or so people in attendance."

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Stephen Colbert lays it all out and it's epic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihHU3IVVrfM

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NYT: Helene Cooper & Eric Schmitt
The military pilots and their crews react

"The intelligence breach was bad enough, current and former fighter pilots said. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s refusal to acknowledge that he should not have disclosed sensitive information about when American fighter pilots would attack sites in Yemen, they said, was even worse.

On air bases, in aircraft carrier “ready rooms” and in communities near military bases this week, there was consternation. The news that senior officials in the Trump administration discussed plans on Signal, a commercial messaging app, for an impending attack angered and bewildered men and women who have taken to the air on behalf of the United States.

The mistaken inclusion of the editor in chief of The Atlantic in the chat and Mr. Hegseth’s insistence that he did nothing wrong by disclosing the secret plans upend decades of military doctrine about operational security, a dozen Air Force and Navy fighter pilots said.

Worse, they said, is that going forward, they can no longer be certain that the Pentagon is focused on their safety when they strap into cockpits.

“The whole point about aviation safety is that you have to have the humility to understand that you are imperfect, because everybody screws up. Everybody makes mistakes,” said Lt. John Gadzinski, a retired Navy F-14 pilot who flew combat missions from aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf. “But ultimately, if you can’t admit when you’re wrong, you’re going to kill somebody because your ego is too big.”

He and other pilots said that each day since Monday, when The Atlantic published an article about the chat disclosures, had brought a stunning new revelation. First came the news that Mr. Hegseth had put the operational sequencing, or flight schedules, for the F/A-18 Hornets targeting the Houthi militia in Yemen on March 15 in the unclassified Signal group chat, which included several other senior officials.

“We intentionally don’t share plans with people who don’t need to know,” said one Navy F/A-18 pilot, who has flown frequently in missions in the Middle East. “You don’t share what time we’re supposed to show up over a target. You don’t want to telegraph that we’re about to show up on someone’s doorstep; that’s putting your crew at risk.” He and several other current and former pilots spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals from the Pentagon and from allies of President Trump.

But then came Mr. Hegseth’s initial response to the disclosures. He attacked Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic editor, as a “so-called journalist,” and sought refuge in a semantic argument, saying that he had never disclosed “war plans.”

So on Wednesday, The Atlantic published the actual text of what he had written, at 11:44 a.m. the day of the attack, in the group chat: “1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package),” Mr. Hegseth texted, some 30 minutes before it happened. “1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike window Starts (Target Terrorist is @his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME).”

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This text was two hours in advance of the strikes.

Mr. Hegseth added: “1410: More F-18s LAUNCH (2nd strike package).” And then, “1536: F-18 2nd Strike Starts — also first sea-based Tomahawks launched.”

That text gave almost three hours’ notice.

On Wednesday, Mr. Hegseth called his disclosure a “team update” to “provide updates in real time, general updates in real time” to keep Trump national security officials informed.

But details of military operations are usually kept so secret that even the service members taking part in them are “locked down.” That sometimes means they are not allowed to speak to others who do not have a need to know, let alone tell people about the plans, the fighter pilots interviewed said. In aircraft carrier “ready rooms,” where flight squadrons spend their time when they are not in the air, crews burn instructions to destroy them.

“It’s important to understand the degree that OPSEC is involved in every aspect of your life on an aircraft carriers,” said retired Navy Capt. Joseph Capalbo, who commanded a carrier air wing and two F/A-18 squadrons, in a reference to operational security. “Red Sea ops are conducted in complete silence — no one is talking on the radio. Because everything can be heard by somebody.”

A retired Air Force fighter pilot, Maj. Anthony Bourke, added: “When you disclose operational security, people can get killed.” He said that “these things are not taken lightly. I have never met anybody in the military who does not know this.”

Mr. Hegseth, a former Fox News weekend host, served as a National Guard infantryman.

Cmdr. Parker Kuldau, a retired Navy F/A-18 pilot, called Mr. Hegseth’s disclosures, and subsequent response to them, “infuriating.”

“It’s so beyond what I would expect from anyone in the military,” said Commander Kuldau, who also flew combat missions in the Middle East. “The idea that the secretary of defense, who should know better, has done this, is just mind-boggling.”

Senior Defense Department officials and military analysts say that the Houthis possess air defenses, provided by Iran, that can target American warplanes.

“The Houthis have received several types of Iranian surface-to-air missiles designed to be capable of engaging fighter jets, including at high altitudes,” said Fabian Hinz, a military analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Indeed, Houthi rebels for the first time fired surface-to-air missiles at an F-16 fighter jet on Feb. 19, a senior U.S. official said. The missiles missed the fighter. The Houthis have shot down several slower-flying U.S. Air Force drones.

The Trump administration has insisted that none of the information on the chat was classified, and Mr. Hegseth and other officials have said it was not a “war plan.”

Sean Parnell, the Pentagon spokesman, said in response to a New York Times inquiry that the Signal chat “referenced by The Atlantic was not a forum for the official planning and execution of military operations — which also involved Joint Staff and Joint Force leadership.”

The chat included Vice President JD Vance; Secretary of State Marco Rubio; the national security adviser, Michael Waltz; and others, but not the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Christopher Grady, the highest-ranking military official.

Mr. Parnell said that “military leadership are frequently not included in political meetings.”

Vice Adm. Kevin M. Donegan, a former F/A-18 pilot and a retired commander of U.S. naval forces in the Middle East, also pushed back on the idea that aviators’ safety had ever been at risk from the disclosure of information on the March 15 attacks.

“Assuming the timeline and information reported is true, the likelihood of anything getting to anyone who could have done anything in such a short time was very low,” Admiral Donegan said. “In the end our planes did not get shot down and no U.S. service personnel were injured or died.”

But one former senior Defense Department official with military experience said Mr. Hegseth’s text describing launch times and the type of strike aircraft was, indeed, classified information that could have jeopardized pilots’ lives if it had been released or obtained.

A former Navy F/A-18 squadron commander also said that pilots flying combat missions would have considered the contents of Mr. Hegseth’s text classified information. Revealing the details in text was “extremely cavalier,” the former pilot said.

Had the Houthis learned the precise time of strikes and that they would be conducted by carrier-based attack planes in the northern Red Sea, they could have repositioned and prepared air defenses that have already shot down several remotely piloted American drones, the former Navy pilot said.

Although Mr. Hegseth has dismissed the risks to the Navy pilots flying those attack missions, videos released by U.S. Central Command tell a different tale.

Some of the F/A-18 Hornets shown taking off from the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Harry S. Truman in the Red Sea were armed with 500-pound and 1,000-pound bombs that could only be dropped well within range of the Houthis’ air defenses."

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From Senate hearing yesterday, Sen Jim HInes' questioning of DNI Tulsi Gabbard

"Oh don’t worry guys, our top intelligence official is just casually boosting Russian state media, but it’s fine because it’s her personal account. Totally normal.
Rest of conversation -
HIMES: Do you think it’s responsible for you, as head of the intelligence community, to retweet posts from individuals affiliated with Russian state media?
GABBARD: That retweet came from my personal account.
HIMES: Personal account? You’re the Director of National Intelligence, not an Instagram influencer. There’s no such thing as “personal” when you’re elevating Kremlin propaganda.
GABBARD: I have the right to share information—
HIMES: Information? You mean Russian disinformation. You sit in high-level intelligence briefings, then turn around and boost the same narratives Moscow is pushing. Should we just CC the Kremlin on your next meeting and cut out the middleman?
GABBARD: This is just an attempt to smear me—
HIMES: Smear you? You lied under oath in a Senate hearing yesterday, claiming you knew nothing about classified information, while sitting in Signal chats where war plans were discussed. You retweet Kremlin-backed sources, then act shocked when people question your loyalties.
GABBARD: I’m focused on national security—
HIMES: National security? While pushing Russian propaganda and pretending you’re clueless about intelligence leaks? If a Democrat had done half of this, you’d be screaming treason on national TV.
GABBARD: This is about free speech—
HIMES: Free speech? You’re the President’s top intelligence advisor, not some random guy on Twitter. Every word you amplify has consequences. And right now, you’re handing America’s enemies exactly what they want—straight from your "personal account."
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1904907517261705605

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So to make it a conspiracy theory here goes. Maybe it was done on purpose because they hate this journalist so much, so that they could go after him and distract us. We sure aren't paying attention to Pres. Elon now.
What Snyder says is true. Our rights for security and this is how to justify it.

[just-jim]

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Timothy Snyder weighs in:

https://snyder.substack.com/p/signalgat ... l-security

“A familiar risk to a rule-based republic, such as our own, is when the government claims that it must violate our rights in the name of national security. In Signalgate, we face a novel challenge: a government that brazenly risks national security in order to preserve its ability to repress its citizens.

We see that traditional problem in the deportations to the Salvadoran gulag. We are told that the government knows who is a terrorist; that we must trust their judgement; and that we must accept their actions. The reasoning, as always, is that there is some kind of exceptional situation -- an "invasion" in this case. If we accept that the government gets to decide what is exceptional, the exception then just becomes the rule. This works psychologically, because we can choose to believe (even though it is usually not true) that we the non-arrested and the non-deported are being made more safe.

But in the Signalgate scandal, we encounter something more chilling: our government is openly compromising our national security, the better to violate our rights. Its position is that it is worth risking the lives of soldiers abroad in order to be able to persecute civilians at home.

Let me explain.

On March 15, high officials of Musk-Trump conducted a group chat on the messenger app Signal about a bombing of Yemen, including a reporter. Jeff Goldberg, placed in one of the oddest situations in journalistic history, replied on March 24th with a restrained factual account of what happened on the chat before he removed himself. The White House and its allies confirmed that all of this happened, but denied that it was of any significance. With this new scandal, we have tipped over into something different: compromising national security in order to preserve a tool which is used chiefly to violate the rights of Americans.
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To see what is novel and what is threatening, let us pause for a moment on the traditional gambit of claiming that we must sacrifice one good thing (freedom) to get another good thing (safety). Musk-Trump is invoking "national security" as a reason why it need not share the facts about its deportation actions with judges, and more broadly as an argument as to why it can deport anyone at any time without due process or indeed any justification at all. The claim here is the old-fashioned one: we must trade rights for security. And the outcome is also the traditional one: if we buy this argument, we lose both. If anyone can be deported at any time for no reason, then we are obviously not only less free but also less secure, as individuals and as a nation.

In a constitutional republic, such as our own, freedom and security alike are grounded in the rule of law. In a rule-of-law state, we can count on the government not apprehending us and deporting us without due process of law and without providing some justification. This practical dignity of our bodies is called habeas corpus, which means that authorities must provide a justification to a court for taking control of your physical body. Logically and historically this is at the foundation of our entire tradition of rights. The individual body comes first; the government must have a good legal reason to confine it.

From this logic, as it strengthened from the Magna Carta eight hundred years ago, to the first English writs of habeas corpus four hundred years ago, to the American Constitution, emerges a usefully liberating skepticism about government purposes. Authorities will always find reasons not to take the individual seriously, and, if permitted, will conspire among themselves to confine our bodies and make us unfree. For this very reason, we have a number of laws, such as the Federal Records Act, whose purpose is to make sure that we know what our government is doing. It is not just that we want them to have a reason for seizing our bodies. It is that we want to be able to head off the kind of government that would plot to do such a thing for tyrannical reasons.

This logic of freedom and tyranny is why government officials, such as those on the Signal chat, are required to record their interactions. Michael Waltz, who initiated the conversation, had the Signal messages set to self-delete. This is a violation of the Federal Records Act and other applicable laws, whose underlying purpose is to protect people from a conspiring government. And so Waltz's action is suggestion of a troubling pattern. Signalgate is shocking on its own. But it is perhaps even more troubling when we begin to understand why the people on the chat were using Signal to make and implement policy. They were risking national security by doing so. But this was worth it to them, apparently, because Signal allows them to deny the rights of Americans.

Let's be clear about the national security problem. For most of us, Signal is a safe platform, and I don't mean to discourage its use by private citizens. But it is specifically forbidden for high government officials to make policy on that platform, because it is less secure that the appropriate government devices. It appears that some of the participants in this Signal chat were highly vulnerable to phishing attacks, since their numbers were publicly available. We know that Russia is trying to hack Signal -- although if the Russians had that data, they would not need to do any very complicated hacking. It is possible, on Signal, to inadvertently add a participant in a group chat or a conversation without knowing who that person is. On government platforms that cannot happen. And then, on Signal, it is possible to go on and share crucial information about, for example, a planned or ongoing military operation, which is exactly did take place on March 15th.

Whatever one thinks about a given military operation, it is hard to disagree that it is better, at least for the Americans involved (the surviving relatives of dead Yemeni civilians might have other views), if the plans are not broadcast around the world before they are implemented. The use of Signal suggests the use of personal phones, which some of the participants have more or less admitted (Tulsi Gabbard refused to say; Steve Witkoff, trying to head off the charge that he was using his personal phone inside the Kremlin, admitted to having joined the chat on it after leaving Russia). And the use of personal phones opens a whole new set of vulnerabilities, including the rather widespread Israeli app Pegasus.

But here's the point: the authorities knew of these risks to national security, and thought that they were worth taking, and for a reason. I suggest that this reason is that Signal chats provide American authorities with cover to plan the violation of human rights.

It is important to understand that the risk is systemic. We know about this one instance of the use of Signal and about the one leak. But other leaks have almost certainly happened already. We know about this particular occasion because the inadvertently-added individual happened, by a wild chance, to be a highly responsible reporter who wrote about the incident in a highly responsible way. The assumption that Jeffrey Goldberg is the only person who was inadvertently added to a national security group, just because he is the only case we know about, is unsustainable.

So the people on the group chat were breaking the law, and they were breaking their own departments' rules, they were ignoring advisories from their own departments, and they were endangering national security. The information that they were sharing, had it gotten into the hands of anyone who has not a highly-responsible reporter, could have compromised not only that attack in particular, but US methods in general. It could also have served as the basis for blackmailing American officials. Indeed, for all we know, information that has been leaked on previous Signal conversations, or on other platforms on personal phones, could be the basis for blackmailing American officials right now. But the use of Signal and personal phones appears nevertheless to be the norm in Musk-Trump. Indeed, the administration has given no sign that this would change.

From the content of the group chat, it is clear that Signal (and, again, likely on personal phones) is the default way that Musk-Trump high officials communicate with one another. This group chat explicitly referred to another one. There was a protocol at the beginning of this chat, which seemed familiar to everyone. It involved adding people whose Signal numbers were known, as if this were a standard procedure. No one during the chat wrote anything like: "hey, why are we using Signal?" The reason that no one did so, most likely, is that they all do this every day.

Using Signal enables American authorities to violate the rights of Americans. Signal is attractive not because it is secure with respect to foreign adversaries, which it is not, but because it is secure with respect to American citizens and American judges. The autodelete function, which Mike Waltz was using, violates the law. But what is most essential is the purpose of that law: to protect the rights of Americans from their government. The timed deletion function allows American officials to be confident that their communications will never be recorded and that they can therefore conspire without any chance of their actions being known to citizens at the time or at any later point.

Everyone on that group chat, including the Vice-President, the Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Advisor, and the Secretary of State, knew that what they were doing was against the rules, the guidance, and the law. But they were doing what they were doing, I would suggest, for a reason: precisely because it allowed them or their colleagues to compromise the rights of Americans.

In other words, it was worth risking the lives of American soldiers abroad in order to have the opportunity the violate the rights of American civilians at home. Making soldiers unsafe is apparently a price worth paying to make the rest of us also unsafe.

If Signal is used for the most sensitive national security discussions, it is reasonable to ask whether it is also used in discussions about sensitive matters of domestic policy -- for example in the discussions of deportations to the Salvadoran gulag or in plans for targeting other individuals. If this is correct, then consider this: when the government contemplates deporting you, it will be doing so on an app that allows those discussions to be secret, not from foreign adversaries, but from you and from judges.

And that, it would appear, is why Signal is being used -- and will be used.

Judge James Boasberg is presiding over the El Salvador deportation case. He will now also preside over the Signalgate case, in which the chat participants are accused of violating the Federal Records Act. It is a curious juxtaposition, to say the least: in the one case, the government is unpersuasively invoking national security to keep secrets; in the other, it is openly violating national security in order to preserve the capacity to keep secrets. I think the two cases are linked, not only conceptually, but also technologically. They show both kinds of arguments for authoritarian rule, the traditional and the novel. But most likely they both involve the use of Signal. Perhaps the judge will take the opportunity to inquire.

Even as the Musk-Trump people continue to say that we must sacrifice our rights for national security, they are also starting to say that they find it worthwhile to violate national security in order to have the tools that allow them to violate our rights. In Signalgate, we see the shift from the conventional excuse for authoritarian practices to an open embrace of tyranny for its own sake.”
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[PAL]

And the looks on Tulsi's face(aka Cruella) said it all. The minute she was asked, "well if it's not classified, why don't you show us the texts?", she had a deadpan look on her face and I yelled out to my husband, she is lying!
Military, speak up!

[THL]

Incredibly incompetent. The kind of thing you would expect from a bunch of clowns cosplaying being Americans. Actually, clowns would do better.