> Hughes said. “Any claim of use for classified information is 100 percent untrue.”
It's great to be able to say "Signal has never, EVER been used for classified information" in a context where classified information discussed on Signal has just been leaked.
Any time you read anything having to do with this administration, remember:
The behavior will continue until an effective negative stimulus is given.
Then immediately stop reading. The details don't matter at this point.
It has to be a stimulus they feel as negative.
Losing office is about the only unarguable one. Barring a coup, that isn't happening any time soon.
Practically any other stimulus will be perceived as positive.
I think what the commenter says is more dire than that. Even after this administration, this is going to keep happening until a major event happens. It's not just about the ghouls in there now, it's about the ghouls that will follow.
A lot of people seem to think this is an anomaly, but they thought that about the first Trump term.
Fundamentally Trump is a symptom. When he goes, all the voters that voted for him will still be there, and they’ll still have all the reasons they voted for him.
I’m convinced they don’t think it’s okay, they just think whatever Fox News tells them endlessly is what’s okay
If Fox News tomorrow changed their tone and message all those sheep would change
It’s that simple
It is more dire than that. The south was basically completely forgiven for starting the civil war and fighting for slavery. Then as soon as they were given a little bit of leeway they enacted Jim Crow laws, began erecting statues of the losers of the Civil War, and started the KKK to drive out black people they could no longer use as slaves.
Many of the people you see in films and photos furiously protesting the civil rights act, picketing with signs against MLK Jr, lynching people during that time, putting glass in the seats of children because the schools were forced to end segregation, etc are still alive. Trump was grown and had started college when the Civil Rights act passed.
Its time to start just forgiving them because they never seem to forget.
It's many things, and that is certainly one of them.
But a crazy percentage of voters thought the economy was literally in a recession. Not even that it was doing poorly, but that there was a recession. Some people just live in an alternate reality.
I agree partially. But there is a large part of the MAGA movement who hate anyone that is not a Christian White Straight male getting ahead. The Democrats will never get those people.
The Democratic Party is not blameless. They are seen as being soft on immigration now. Obama deported more people than Trump.
They forgot the lesson that allowed Bill Clinton to win - “It’s the Economy Stupid”.
And no matter how you feel about it. There is a large part of the United States, even among the LGB crowd who don’t want biological men in women’s sports.
DEI the way it is framed is toxic to millions and I as a Black guy rolled my eyes at much of the indoctrination and “ally” nonsense I had to endure during my stint at BigTech.
No matter how you feel about this either, it takes a remarkable amount of lack of self awareness by the DNC not to know how toxic this attitude is to a large swath of American voters.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/02/dnc-mee...
> The rules specify that when we have a gender-nonbinary candidate or officer, the nonbinary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six officers must be gender balanced
Yes, but we’ve seen how easily they can be controlled by playing to their hatred.
Earlier than the first term. "The fever will break": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBvoG7pBc1A
True, but I think this misses the deeper dynamic nature of such things. Trump is the symptom, but these voters were also reacting in their turn. It is highly unlikely that this exact sequence of triggers will immediately repeat themselves.
In theory, Congressional investigation w/ power of subpoena and an ability to hand out prison sentences. Also in theory, if they lose office, subsequent admin needs to be able to prosecute. Assuming we can vote again in the future
We literally have a Supreme Court decision saying that the President has immunity as long as he was acting as part of his official duties. So while any clear-minded person will see that, say, running a protection racket on law firms from the White House is blatantly illegal and a crime, all Trump has to do is argue that he did so in his official capacity as president and not as a private citizen, and he is instantly 100% immune from consequences.
That's the thing. Regardless of whether or not you think the Court was unconstitutionally packed (due to the Senate running out the clock on the Garland nomination under Obama), it doesn't matter, because SCOTUS rulings are precedent and therefore effectively law. So it's no longer true even in theory, unless Trump v. US is overturned.
High-aggression is a negotiating tactic with basic goals - to intimidate the other side into thinking you are implacable, and to make you seem unstoppable.
It's a tactic. Like everyone else, they have interests and goals and needs, and they can be deterred in the same way. The problem is, nobody really tries. The Democrats keep doing the same ineffective things - a demonstration of being cowed and intimidated.
For example, the Dems have almost no ability to communicate with the public. Whatever Trump and the GOP say are effectively true because there is no counter voice (beyond some third parties). The Dems don't do anything about it; they just keep communicating in the same way.
The Dems have no talking points. A few of them are organizing now around 'economic populism' - in other words, they are completely cowed and will avoid all the major threats to freedom, democracy, the rule of law, safety; the corruption, cruelty, and hate. They are going to their safe space - economic policy!
I can't imagine what kind of talking points one needs to offer past "uh, we aren't criminals and we're not incompetent".
If the response is "yeah, we're good with those things, what else have you got?" I don't know what to say. You want bread? Maybe some circuses?
The Democrats did have plenty of policies. Realistic ones. Not the most exciting. If the public wants to be excited, and aren't picky about it, then indeed they should have that. But I'm not going to be able to provide it.
DARVO is so incredibly effective. I wonder what comes next for the world.
The American people have proven over the past few elections that they don’t care about policy or the economy even
“It’s the economy, stupid” is over
It is now the era of “It’s the vibes, stupid”
It wasn't just the lack of a primary: They just look like losers. They were going all in on a losing candidate and didn't seem to care. It's bizarre.
Many Dem leaders don't seem to care now, complaining that people are pressuring them to be effective.
> They told the public the truth, basic facts like
Just telling people the 'truth' isn't effective communication at all (in fact, it can be dangerous) - that should be obvious to anyone with some experience in life. To tell the 'truth' and then throw up your hands because it didn't work is just being at victim.
A major political party knows all that - it's shameful and corrupt that they don't care to be effective.
>For example, the Dems have almost no ability to communicate with the public.
This +100. Even B Clinton as a 25+yr citizen communicates better with the public than 99% of active Dem politicians.
> Name a major statement by a Democrat
Name a major Democrat. There is none. After 3 electoral cycles when party bureaucracy each time crowned the candidate instead of a candidate rising through the primaries the party has no leaders anymore - note the difference between a leader and a top bureaucrat, the Dems have no deficit of the latter.
Maybe more of them could follow Pete Buttigieg to Fox News?
What makes a statement "major" is the amount of attention it is given. That is out of your control.
Democrats are making many statements. If they are not "major", it is perhaps because nobody cares about statements. They care about the exercise of power, and Democrats have none. Any statement they make is easily dismissed as bluster.
Even when it is directly connected - ie. the people will see much higher prices copy pasted everywhere due to the Trump’s import taxes while Trump will be giving to the billionaires the tax cut financed by the tariffs - and the people will still cheer up on Trump.
Coming from a UK background something I've been long curious about is is there a constitutional reason for when the opposition presidential candidate is selected.
It seems like the current way of doing things leaves the opposition rudderless through most of a presidential term, followed by a bitter fight where their own side rip each other apart followed by only a few months to try and establish oneself as leader in waiting.
Could the democrats do their primaries now? It feels like that would 1. Distract from Trump so he doesn't get run of the news 2. Mean that all the "candidate X is a bad democrat" stories could be long forgotten by the next election. 3. Give a pedestal to the actual presidential candidate as the go to person for the media to get reactions from 4. If they turn out to be genuinely terrible there's a lot of time to find out and potentially replace them.
That is a good observation.
Primaries are actually a relatively recent innovation. Before that, the candidates just appeared from the party machines. All of the ugliness went on out of public view.
For the last several elections people complained that there wasn't much difference between Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris. And there isn't. They are a center leftish (by American standards) bunch.
The party has a small wing further to the left, but it just isn't enough to put forth a strong candidate. That is the biggest ugliness we get now: they don't feel represented and often, they don't vote.
The states have laws when you can hold a primary but nothing in the constitution.
> Coming from a UK background something I've been long curious about is is there a constitutional reason for when the opposition presidential candidate is selected.
That's a very interesting point. On the other hand, the GOP did have a leader through the Biden administration - Trump.
Even when they don't, such as under Obama, they do have effective means (Fox, social media, etc.) and content (effective, disciplined talking points) of communication. The Dems have neither.
the problem is that running any sort of campaign that effectively reaches the continental and population scale of the US is incredibly expensive. Bernie Sanders for example raised $228M during his primary campaign in 2016. it would be hard to see how to make that happen more frequently.
Constitutional? No, except that states run the primaries.
... but when the primaries are is encoded into state law, so it would be a challenge to change it for every state if one wanted to shift when "the primaries" as a whole concept are.
> The Dems have no talking points. A few of them are organizing now around 'economic populism' - in other words, they are completely cowed and will avoid all the major threats to freedom, democracy, the rule of law, safety; the corruption, cruelty, and hate. They are going to their safe space - economic policy!
Because sadly, thats what the people respond to. When given the choice between food on the table / roof over their head / cash in the bank account and abstract values like "republican government", "rule of law" and "protecting human rights" etc. they will choose the former. Especially as long as its OTHER people's rights, and OTHER parties getting surpressed, they don't care quite so much. We've seen this play out in Russia. Granted they did not have the long history of Republican government that the US has had.
The irony with Trump is they may get neither. At least some of them. Authoritarians have way of mollifying that minimum % that actually matters. Mostly people with guns and willingness to use them. In the US we're talking as low as 25% (so 75% of us are effectively screwed). And when you have billionaires controlling the information space, it would be very difficult to organize opposition.
I'm now looking out to 2028. Trump and his cronies may be plotting to crash the system and "declare an emergency" so elections get suspended. Or the alternative, he just runs again and dares anyone to stop him. The blue/purple states should at the very least, bar him from appearing on the ballot there's a question of whether there will have enough backbone and could not be sufficiently threatened/bullied into backing down, or if he tries to pull a 2020 again with an "alternate electors", at the very least cause confusion so the election can be thrown to the House where GOP almost assuredly would have control over the state delegations. Lastly, the various Federal agencies, possibly even the military would be sufficiently "Trumpified" such that they will threaten, maybe even resort to force.
They vote for their economic interests, in the sense that they vote in the way that they believe furthers those interests. Whether that vote actually furthers those interests is another matter. Republicans have been very successful at convincing people that they’re the ones who are good for the economy and everyone who works hard will prosper under their policies.
I don't think thats the way most of them see it. Right-wing propaganda has effectively convinced them that unions, government regulations, worker and environmental protections, etc. are all bad and the free market will magically solve everything.
Decades of Red Scare propaganda convinced those people that benefits, healthcare and labour rights are commie desires… and how dare you want to bring communism into America
I think that's what effective means.
A truism, but:
There are a lot of Trump supporters on HN. More data points that highlight how incompetent or corrupt this administration is might eventually sway them.
Midterm and special elections are real points where negative stimuli could occur. If polling gets bad enough, swing state Republican politicians might start sweating sooner.
So maybe for you this is just obvious confirmation of what you already know. But by reporting and following up on this story, maybe some people will learn and understand something they did not before.
Trump supporters are unswayable. The same rule about negative stimulus applies. Nothing you can say makes a difference, but if they start losing money eventually they might change behavior. Or they radicalize further.
The dems paid an insanely heavy cost to appease the 1% of the population that is chronically on twitter. They lost mountains of votes to trump over that.
There’s a core cult (not pejorative) that's unswayable, but that’s not who handed him political power. It was the politically disaffected people who he managed to reach and Dems failed to.
It’s worth speaking to those folks.
You speak oddly of people like they are monolithic and lacking perceptive nuance (more like animals than any people I know). In the US, of all places, there is tremendous heterogeneity. What are the key elements that you know of “they”?
I think it’s safe to say that there is severe overfitting and pattern matching behavior involved. When I come across someone who says something so broadly judgmental and unfounded, I become immediately intrigued as to how this person is either exploiting or exploited, one of which is assured. I hope you are doing okay.
It's just odd to me.
I mean, yeah the Democrat party sucks.
Here's this "macho tough guy" that wears a diaper, lifts, and makeup...who's famous for bankrupting a casino (twice), and was known for decades as a cartoon character, a clown, a moron. They hear the "on day 1" promises that won't ever get resolved. They see what happened the last time this guy took the wheel.
And they want more of it? Unswayable indeed.
I thought America was immune from fascism because it generally took the form of an idiotic leader that had charisma. I thought my fellow countrymen and countrywomen were smarter than that. Of all the people to succumb to, it's this fucking guy? Seriously?
If a political party ships innocent people off to concentration camps without due process and promises to take over allied nations by any means necessary — and someone supports that party despite, or even because of, those policies — then there is nothing left to see or to understand. You hate {DEI|taxation|government waste|woke culture} so much that you're willing to upend democracy and centuries-old alliances just to see it gone? OK. It's a matter of axiomatically incompatible worldviews at that point.
Moreover, cults of personality are shockingly common. Many people simply do not reason themselves into their political positions. Probe their beliefs beyond surface level and there's no consistency beyond "ingroup good, outgroup bad."
Or many of them are some combination of racists, care about gun rights over everything else, religious folks who think that protesting Isreal will result in the second coming of Christ, anti-choice, and something something woke.
When people sincerely believe that if the country gives gay people rights that it will cause the nation to burn in hell, there isn’t any convincing people.
The usual answer is some mix of, I like his policies, he tells it like it is, and the Democrats are worse.
Sounds good but makes little sense. He contradicts himself constantly. Anyone will find policies of his that they can agree with, because he covers the spectrum. You want strict gun control and universal government health care? He’s your guy. You’re a 2A absolutist and think health care should be totally unregulated? Trump is your man! Likewise with “tells it like it is.” I’m convinced that his popularity is mostly due to the fact that he just spews so much crap. If you manage to only hear the parts you like, you’ll think he’s great.
“The Democrats are worse” could be sensible, but it’s almost always based on a notion of Democrats that’s completely disconnected from reality.
Lacking in insight?
My brother in christ......Donald Trump wears makeup. How many actual "tough guys" do you know that wear makeup?
Back in the days of my parents, a fat guy with lifts and orange makeup would have been called a (anti-gay slur) and would have been the butt of every joke.
He's bankrupted 2 casinos, failed to sell football steaks airlines and liquor to Americans, he shits himself and wears a diaper, and is so intellectually deficient that me, an autistic guy, could run circles around him in debate.
Yet somehow, he's seen as a "business genius". HA!
It’s baffling. I sort of get why some people like strongmen. Hitler and Mussolini fought and bled for their country. Stalin and Mao led armies to victory. They were bad people but I can’t deny that they were strong in some sense.
But Trump? A middling businessman and second-rate TV star nobody would have ever heard of if he hadn’t been born rich? He has zero credentials for this. What gives?
> the Democrat party sucks
> And they want more of it [Trump]?
Those two things are closely related. Who votes for inffectual, feckless, cowards, who are hiding from the crisis?
> Trump supporters are unswayable.
You fell for the aggression tactic - it's just a cheap negotiating / political tactic. Act hyperagressive and some will believe you are unstoppable, implacable, etc.
> Trump supporters are unswayable.
While they certainly love the guy, this is demonstrably untrue.
Otherwise, we wouldn't have had a President Biden interregnum.
Some degree of incompetence is certainly a bridge too far, at least for some of his supporters.
We're not unswayable, I was swayed.
8 years ago, I was a left-libertarian living in SF and trying to convince Trump people to vote for Hillary because Trump was dishonest.
Then I was swayed because people provided information to me that changed my views. Now I view what Trump is doing now as FAR too moderate.
>Then immediately stop reading. The details don't matter at this point.
That's truly an absurd suggestion. I hope you're just attempting to make some kind of point, but not suggesting people actually ignore "the details"
People have been doing nothing but reading "the details" for the last ten years.
Where are we?
I'd say it's the opposite. They are flooded with misinformation, disinformation, and disruptive trauma, and don't read the facts.
bingo. i have nothing to add, just chiming in to let you know theres others out there who are at the point of not reading about it any longer. if the people who are in a position to do something about it arent doing anything about it, then reading more about it is as useful as watching porn.
> I can do nothing
The far right and Trump's biggest support is people acting helpless and spreading their dogma of helplessness. It's surreal to see how effective their propaganda is - this is right out of psyops playbooks. It's truly unmaerican to throw up your hands - nobody is going to do it for you, and anything is possible. That's part of freedom.
Does this sentiment extend more broadly than a single administration? Can we broadly expect many potentially problematic behaviors to continue until an effective negative stimulus is given?
It's interesting to me why this perspective is popular when applied a certain administration but not popular when applied to other things such as
* Poverty \ * Drug Addiction \ * Homelessness \ * Obesity \ * Undocumented Border Crossings
This is what I find so funny about the oh so serious protests about the current administration that people make in these comments. When other administrations do the same thing, it's one excuse after another, or just silence. These people are just mindlessly posting based on political memes, they're simply not serious.
Which other administration filed executive orders banning specific law firms from federal buildings and their customers from winning federal contracts because the law firm once employed a lawyer who once investigated or sued that administration?
I’ll wait.
You mean they convinced a grand jury to charge him, and then convinced a jury of his peers to convict him of 34 felony counts, all while he had legal representation that most of us could only dream of?
I guess all you'd need is evidence.
Biden being the President and the DOJ charging Trump does not imply "Biden went after Trump."
There's actually no evidence Biden played any role in DOJ's decision to prosecute either for the stolen classified documents or for the election fraud. The brazen criminality was sufficient for an independent DOJ to take up the matter.
inb4 "DOJ didn't make that decision independently" which is another way of saying "I'm willing to believe things without evidence."
You have remarkable authority on this. Can you tell us more about it?
Well said
Stimulus
One nice side effect of Signal's importance for governmental/military use is that it helps keep it free for civilian use. They can't mandate a backdoor for something other parts of the government rely on to be secure.
I once heard a great anecdote to that effect, and to my embarrassment I can't recall the details to repeat here.
(And yes, I understand that there are limits on what is appropriate to share with civilian hardware on a civilian network, but the truth stands that part of the reason there's not a push to breach encryption in the US like there is in the UK is because Signal is relied upon even by the government when they need a private channel on civilian hardware.)
> They can't mandate a backdoor for something other parts of the government rely on to be secure.
This is a strong assumption.. A government is a collection of people. While there might not exactly be warring factions in the US government, there are certainly numerous agencies and organizations that operate under varying degrees of independence.
News reports would be much clearer if each faction had a medieval crest, logo, or even UUID.
Give them a NFT.
Even more sinister is the false hope bias. The Signal app can be used as a honeypot to plant a pseudo-secure messenger, a sophisticated device around a backdoor, or even a trojan-like capability.
The Tor network was deemed the culprit of anonymity and secure connections not long ago. We all know how it went.
> The Signal app can be used as a honeypot to plant a pseudo-secure messenger
Given its open source nature that would be exceedingly difficult.
> The Tor network was deemed the culprit of anonymity and secure connections not long ago. We all know how it went.
What are you talking about? Tor is still the uncontested king of low-latency anonymity networks.
This has been a solved problem since 2016: https://signal.org/blog/reproducible-android/
> They can't mandate a backdoor for something other parts of the government rely on to be secure
Has the NSA moved on from the NOBUS ("NObody But US") doctrine? Empirically, they have been more than happy to keep any vulnerability (or backdoor) available if they believe only they can exploit it.
> They can't mandate a backdoor for something other parts of the government rely on to be secure.
Why not? It wouldn't be difficult to have a backdoor in the civilian use-case that's disabled for government use.
A major reason for these people using Signal is specifically to avoid government access to records of these chats. In particular access by future administrations, or current or near future judicial or congressional investigations.
Now the task of an adversary is to simply enable the backdoor rather than create it from scratch. The people using Signal for this are doing it on their own devices, so now you have multiple problems.
Eg how to get non technical people to know when they’re using the civilian version.
Alternative crazy universe: Just use the tech that was created for the government and does all the right things.
I'm not defending the use of signal. That said this strawman is very weak. It's not uncommon to have two versions of the same app on your phone these days. My Google drive instance changes from personal to company based on my identity. This isn't hard to implement securely these days.
But then you’re required to archive the discussions for the public to access. That’s much worse for these people than foreign agents (and journalists apparently) listening in and taking notes.
You'd be surprised how much the government would potentially hurt itself in its own confusion. Not all parts of it are aligned to the same beliefs / mission, and there are certainly parts that believe in the saying "Why are you worried if you have nothing to hide".
There was a rather interesting criticism of the recent wide-ranging cuts to USAID that basically said it wasn't unlikely that some of that USAID money was being used in clandestine intelligence operations (supporting the tribe of this warlord or that, paying someone off, rewarding allegiances, whatever) that DOGE and perhaps even most at USAID would never, ever be cleared to know about. With the inability to prevent those aid packages from being cut without also blowing their operations, the intelligence community would just have to sit and watch it happen.
I of course have no way of knowing if that's true or not, or if it is what damage may have been done, but it's interesting to consider.
I don't claim to be an expert, nor to be able to speak credibly on the interactions of the millions of people in government.
I just remember hearing an anecdote from a friend with ties to Signal that some part of the government wanted to recommend it and another part slapped their hand because they didn't want to encourage people to use technology that law enforcement can't breach.
Even though I just use it for casual conversations with friends, that gave me some extra confidence in using it.
Sorry, but no, there is no good thing to come from government using Signal. With its auto-deleting messages, that makes it illegal for government employees to use, and destroys transparency.
Auto-deleting messages are not necessarily auto-illegal. Voice conversations are also auto-deleting but obviously they’re common among government employees.
Officials are required to document decisions in an archival way. If they fail to do that, it is arguable that their failure to follow the law is the problem, not the messaging technology.
I think it is in everyone’s interest to resist the assumption that chat and text messaging is intended to be a permanent record—even for govt officials.
Illegal has no meaning for people who can pardon themselves and each other.
If anything having his appointees commit lots of public crimes is great for Trump because his pardon power then gives them a powerful incentive to please him personally.
I believe that's true for employees of the executive branch.
Is it true for the other two?
The president can pardon anyone.
Thanks, yes that is right. We may find out whether a president can pardon himself, but since his actions as president are not prosecutable, there's a lot of latitude for never needing a pardon.
Eh.... you think government officers who fat-clicked a journalist into a top secret discussion would care about whether some other three-letter agency has access to a backdoor in Signal?
For all we know, whoever US agent who was responsible for handling these potential "backdoors" is already laid off and is available for pickup by foreign governments with the right payment.
you believe that fat clicker story? consider this: what if they wanted to leak, they wanted to leak to someone that the bombings were going to put in immediate danger, and they added the journalist just in case the leak got exposed?
Doesn't pass the smell test for me. The most obvious answer is probably the correct one and IMO the most obvious situation would be:
Jeffrey Goldberg's number was absolutely in Mike Waltz' phone because Mike Waltz was one of his sources.
Mike Waltz accidentally added Jeffrey Goldberg to the chat either due to a misclick or (more likely, IMO) being dumb enough to use a conflicting contact id label for multiple people and being careless when forming the list.
Not being able to admit to being a Goldberg source for political reasons, he (Waltz) made up some insane story about the number being 'sucked into his phone' and having never talked to Goldberg.
Additionally, I'd assume (based on being the most obvious solution) that Trump et al fully realize Waltz was both responsible for this screwup and would like to fire him for it but view firing him as giving "the libs" a win and have stubbornly kept him on despite not really wanting to (less because of his screwup and more because of who he accidentally added).
Waltz was Congressman from Florida before National Security Advisor, and it makes sense that he would have contact info for The Atlantic editor-in-chief.
I took a look at the Signal group creation UI when this story came out.
Not only does Signal suggest contacts, but it also suggests people you're in mutual groups with. Even if Waltz didn't have the Atlantic's JG as a contact, it's possible that they were both added to some group, and that Waltz accidentally picked JG-the-journalist when creating his Houthi raid one.
The story should have ended Waltz’s career, at which point he would have been a zero-value source going forward. The story was far more valuable than the current value of the source, and the future value approached zero assuming someone else broke the story before the Atlantic. Reasonable calculus.
This is the most likely explanation. To add to this: They will fire him, but in a few months time for “unrelated reasons” such as “unsatisfactory job performance” or whatever.
>Additionally, I'd assume (based on being the most obvious solution) that Trump et al fully realize Waltz was both responsible for this screwup and would like to fire him for it
What did Hegseth mean by "We're clean on OPSEC"? Who was assuming responsiblity for the security of their communications?
Lol. No.
BlackBerry was in the same position, and it was absolutely backdoored from a crypto perspective. The FBI doesn’t cry about iPhones anymore, so they’ve likely (along with other entities) identified alternate methods to access communications.
The use of these sorts of actions are about avoiding accountability, not security. Again, BlackBerry is the exemplar — PIN messaging was tied to a device, not a user. People 20 years ago were doing these signal chats with BlackBerry devices, swapping them around physically to build these groups.
Even then, people in these positions of power weren’t as reckless and incompetent. In addition to the reporter, one of the participants was on a civilian phone in Russia. The FSB or whomever does their signals intelligence got a real-time feed of intelligence, military operations, etc. The American pilots were put at risk, and Israeli spies were burned.
> The FBI doesn’t cry about iPhones
Is there any evidence that iPhones have some security exploit that Apple + Three letter agencies can use?
Have you looked at the list of security issues fixed by Apple? They contain multiple zero-day exploits found in the wild.
This week’s releases: 100+ security issues of varying severity fixed in macOS, 50+ issues fixed in iOS.
Citizen Lab has some reports on exploits.
> so they’ve likely (along with other entities) identified alternate methods to access communications.
> Is there any evidence that iPhones have some security exploit that Apple + Three letter agencies can use?
GP never made that claim.
Does anyone remember which US gov entity funded Signal and Open Whisper Systems?
Signal chairman is ex-CEO of Wikipedia.
Signal CEO estimated annual costs at $50MM.
i mean... you're saying if signal weren't secure, trump's clown cabinet would stop using it? the guy who kept boxes of top secret documents in a bathroom at mar-a-lago? you don't think they'd just use SMS or facebook messenger or anything if using signal was a slight inconvenience?
The reason for this is simply to avoid discovery / FOIA requests, since messages delete.
Of courses it’s illegal, but the entire administration is operating as a criminal enterprise / an extension of all previous administrations, but in a way the most impressive disregard for rule of law we’ve seen.
FOIA doesn't apply to the Executive Office of the President. The NSC is covered by the Presidential Records Act, but its records are not subject to FOIA requests.
Burin' Karma to speak the truth here.
[flagged]
Were they following Elon's advice? https://www.dailywire.com/news/elon-musk-two-word-tweet-send... :)
I know we've all been talking about how 'history is back' in terms of geopolitics not ending like some thought in the 90s. But if a huge proportion of goverment communications is taking place on self destructing messages rather than minuted meetings and filed paperwork etc, perhaps history has ended after all.
There are a ton of face-to-face conversations between officials that don't get recorded. Why is text messaging so special? Are their phone calls recorded? I don't think they are.
Both face to face meetings and phone calls have dedicated note takers. This level of ignorance is truly breathtaking
For important meetings, sure. But not for unofficial conversations or meetings.
You really think they are being tracked and recorded everywhere they go? You are breathtakingly delusional.
History has always been what the winner makes of it, and with self-destructing messages that winner's task just got much easier.
I'm really surprised that these folks go with Signal over something like Element or another Matrix client. Element/Matrix is already used in other places within the Government and has a better UX for team collaboration while maintaining high standards of encryption, so you would think that would be the default.
> high standards of encryption
Security is far more than that and Signal does the 'far more'. Every independent security expert (I can think of) recommends Signal for security, including CISA, and now the CIA, NSC, etc.
One security pundit, I think Schneier, said that focusing on encryption is like putting a titanium door on your house and saying it's secure. Yes, nobody can damage that door, but there are windows, hinges, a lock to pick, the chimney, remote listening devices, tracking Internet usage, searching your garbage, ...
What is supposed to be the default, though? Presumably not something that goes on your phone, right?
That said I’m not sure how leaders are supposed to quickly collaborate across time and space anymore. Not every location has a SCIF, but I suppose that’s the high bar we should hold.
sounds like an employee of signal
> All four were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the private chats.
Anyone with access to NSA plus various subcontractors' toolsets can "unmask" these people in like five minutes. Musk may not be "tech genius" some of the media makes him out to be, but he knows enough about how the internet and computers work (or has advisors who do) to figure that out.
I'm doubtful because the government leaks like a sieve. Maybe it's not that easy?
> Two of the people said they were in or have direct knowledge of at least 20 such chats. All four said they saw instances of sensitive information being discussed.
Are they adding just everybody under the sun in these chats or only those who think wouldn't be traitors? For example I can understand one snitch being added by mistake. But four snitches?
That's a lot of snitches in my book.
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You can pull yourself by the bootstraps and click on other stories.
Don’t expect others to do stuff for you.
Although I suspect you want the story not discussed, in the name of free speech I assume?
Looking at your comments, I don’t think you actually believe this.
Choosing to click on it so you can be mad is really a you problem.
Well, it's clear this was leaked so they can throw Waltz to the wolves. "He was a rogue employee, and he is the only one who did this."
I am not conspiratorially minded, but I bet this was because Waltz had Jeffrey Goldberg's number. I bet Waltz leaked things to Goldberg in the past, and this is the Trump administration cutting ties with him in the most "sleep with the fishes" way possible.
> throw Waltz to the wolves.
Except they forgot to actually throw him to the wolves? Or will that come later somehow?
That theory really doesn’t work. It’s not a situation where one person went rouge and did something. The thing about a group chat is that it’s literally by definition a group activity and that particular group now includes:
1. The head of the CIA
2. The secretary of defence
3. The vice president
4. The director of national intelligence
5. The White House chief of staff
6. Chief of Staff for the Secretary of the Treasury
7. Acting Chief of Staff for the Director of National Intelligence, and nominee for National Counterterrorism Center Director.
8. The Secretary of State
Plus a bunch of others including random trump political allies like Steven miller and witkoff, a journalist and an as yet unidentified person known only as “Jacob”.
But they collectively got together, and decided repeatedly to do this over 30 different occasions in just this story alone.
But don’t let anyone try to convince you this was some single persons problem, this was the absolute textbook definition of a conspiracy at the highest levels of government to knowingly and repeatedly violate the law with regards to both handling classified information and around government record keeping laws.
And this line they are trying to spin about signal was somehow approved for use is here in black and white proven to be wrong with the NSA making it clear there was a known vulnerability in the platform and it wasn’t even approved for unclassified but official use communications as recently as February 2025: https://www.scribd.com/document/843124910/NSA-full
Does this administration need to make sense?
The CIA director - excessively biased as he may be - testified last week that Signal is a CIA-approved application that was preloaded onto the device he was issued on his first day. He said this practice extends back to at least the Biden Administration.
Given this, and assuming it’s true, I wonder to what degree a controversy can be predicated on usage of an approved application on an approved Government device. I’m sure there is plenty to nitpick around the edges (“classified vs. top secret,” “managed device vs. personal device,” “expiring messages,” etc.), but the fundamental transgression cannot be “using Signal.”
More importantly, I just don’t think people care — beyond pearl-clutching, tribal narratives and palace intrigue — about the safety of “classified data.” And the sad part is that it’s obfuscating the real story, which is the federal government’s seemingly indiscriminate bombing of Yemeni residences in an attempt to execute a mildly infamous terrorist. It’s the banal tone with which the government officials discuss it – like it’s a new product launch or a weekly check-in meeting – that we should find disturbing. Nobody cares about the communication medium; if anything, we should wish for _more_ transparency and visibility into discussions like this…
(Also, it’s quite an endorsement of Signal.)
I agree that a lot of people don't care. But the government installs secure rooms (SCIFs) in various locations for the safe discussion of classified material:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/scif-inside-high-security-rooms-2...
Just because Signal comes preinstalled on devices doesn't automatically mean it's intended for discussion of classified material.
Exactly, Signal should be used for "official" things like scheduling lunch with colleagues. I don't think it's proper (and potentially illegal) to be planning the things they did on there. It's too easy to screw up which is why the public knows about it now; you're not able to easily invite third parties into a SCIF.
Scheduling lunch is a great example. It's the kind of low-grade information which would be marginally beneficial to adversaries (who might arrange to, say, bug a restaurant if they knew VIPs would be meeting there), so it's worth hiding, but it's not really of public interest so doesn't need to be recorded durably. And the downside of leaking impending lunch plans to a journalist, one time, by accident, is likely inconsequential compared to, say, leaking impending military attack plans to a journalist, one time, by accident.
Signal does not come preinstalled on devices for them. He lied about that.
Can you cite something to corroborate that claim?
https://www.scribd.com/document/843124910/NSA-full
It’s not even approved for unclassified information that’s used in an official capacity.
I'd have liked to see the CIA Director cite something to corroborate HIS claim.
The Biden Administration strongly denies his claim.
>Former Biden officials, though, said that Signal was never permitted on their government phones.
“We were not allowed to have any messaging apps on our work phones,” said one former top national security official on the condition of anonymity. “And under no circumstances were unclassified messaging apps allowed to be used for transmission of classified material. This is misdirection at its worst.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-war-plans-signal-biden_...
Yes, though don't forget about the incompetence of adding the wrong person to the chat which goes part and parcel with the embarrassingly superficial/cynical discourse.
I still can’t believe this. It’s just so comically absurd, like it’s straight out of the plot of Veep. Of all the people to add to the group chat, you add your most vocal critic with the largest megaphone?
There are a few possible explanations:
- “It was intentional.” This doesn’t pass the smell test and it’s not clear who benefits.
- ”It was a setup.” I suppose this is possible, if the Intelligence Community is preloading the application onto the devices in question.
- ”It was an accident.” In some ways this is the most believable and unbelievable. What are the chances that you just happen to add Jeff Goldberg to the chat?! Which leads to the final possibility…
- ”It was an accident, and not the first time.” We just heard about it this time because Goldberg was the one included. This would explain the astounding coincidence, because it changes “the one time they messed up was in front of the editor of The Atlantic” to “this time they messed up was in front of the editor of The Atlantic.”
If they did it once, what are the chances the most vocal recipient was the first example of the mistake?
I’m sure we can count on an extensive audit of the participants in these 20+ other chats……
There's a lot here, and it's more complicated then "the government should never use Signal".
First off, I 100% agree that the bombing of civilian buildings in Yemen should be a bigger controversy. I don't really have anything to add to that, I just agree that it's important.
There are a lot of situations where it'd be acceptable for a government employee to us Signal, even to communicate potentially sensitive data. There are a lot of times where someone with only phone access may need to communicate sensitive info, and Signal is a good tool for that. It's a hell of a lot better then text messages or Slack or whatever.
The issue isn't Signal's security, it's the security of the phone it's installed onto. The phones of high-ranking government employees are a huge security weak point, and other countries know it. One has to imagine that Russia (or some other country) is trying very hard to hack into Pete Hegseth's phone. A lot of countries have invested huge amounts of money into developing hacking teams, and it should be assumed that any device with access to the broader internet is a potential target.
That's why government devices that access high-security information have immensely high security requirements. From air-gapped networks, to only buying hardware from vetted vendors, to forbidding outside devices (like phones) from even being in the same room. This is a level of security that Signal can't provide, and is necessary when discussing things like military plans.
Finally, the fact that someone accidentally added a journalist to this group and no one said anything shows a frankly reckless attitude towards security. Someone should have double checked that everyone on the group was supposed to be there, and the fact that no one did is fucking embarrassing.
That message is in 100% direct contradiction with literally every other piece of evidence to come out of the IC. I would put it to you that he lied under oath.
Here’s evidence in writing from NSA from earlier this year that makes it extremely clear that isn’t the case: https://www.scribd.com/document/843124910/NSA-full
> More importantly, I just don’t think people care — beyond pearl-clutching, tribal narratives and palace intrigue — about the safety of “classified data
This doesn't actually contradict your point about tribal narratives, but it's not that long ago that data misuse was an election-defining narrative involving FBI investigations and crowds chanting "lock her up"...
I'd say the 'nitpicking around the edges' is actually incredibly important, but as you also said, people don't care. Yes, all the attention is on the use of Signal, and not the bombing/killing innocent Yemenis to score some political points.
The bombing/killing of innocent Yemenis can't be politicized because everyone agrees with it, nobody can score political points from it if everyone is in agreement.
> the real story, which is the federal government’s seemingly indiscriminate bombing of Yemeni residences in an attempt to execute a mildly infamous terrorist
also the story about how a natsec reporter just happens to be so intimately in contact with these officials that they accidentally add him to the group chat in the first place. There is no adversarial relationship between journalists and the state department, there never was, no matter who is in the white house. They just parrot whatever the US or allied nations are saying when it comes to foreign policy (that is the illegal invasion and murder of innocent civilians in foreign sovereign nations).
The fact that they used signal and leaked some messages to a propagandist is a distant third, but everyone only cares about that, makes me sick. This is why the US is hated around the world, and nobody gives a shit about Trump outside the western bubble.
You know what else comes preinstalled on phones? The phone, sms, and mail apps.
I keep thinking that the real story about this Signal stuff is that whatever authorized government equipment/software they’re supposed to be using probably just sucks. Onerous, old, too much authentication, password silliness, biometrics, auto logout after 2 minutes, etc etc.
Do not mean to downplay the mistake (at a minimum, the SecDef should suffer the same fate a lower ranking member of the DoD would for reasons of military order), but humans will be humans. Dealing with security sucks and involves trade offs and compromises.
No, the government has not had issues running military operations using its existing comms. The actual story is that they used Signal on purpose to bypass required government record-keeping laws.
Can you please help us to understand why you believe the military has had *no* issues using existing comms? At face value this is an extraordinary claim and it flies in the face of examples of friendly fire such as https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj30zk1jnmno. I think the strongest possible statement would be "military comms are equal to or better than civilian alternatives with the exception that they do not bypass government record keeping laws" but I'm mostly unaware of what the military uses to communicate so it's difficult for me to accept this at face value with an explanation of the existing systems and their capabilities.
Some government software and processes are not pleasant to deal with such as the process of obtaining a green card so I don't really fault people for being skeptical of the existing systems without evidence of their robustness.
I would say two things. 1) security inherintly is annoying, the more secure something is the more it sucks to use. Military communication channels have to withstand the most powerful attacks in the world, everyone, Russians Chinese Europeans Israelis, would all love to get access. So these have to be extremely secure and thus annoying to use channels.
2) their are laws about storing government communications which are built in to the official channels. Trumpists are suspiciously intentionally breaking these laws.
I wonder people who criticize the government for using Signal, you only discuss work using company-approved applications? Also why do they use Signal and not Telegram, which probably has more useful features like spoilers, paid messages, animated emojis etc.
My work doesn't involve sending American pilots over enemy territory or relaying information from intelligence assets inside terrorist organizations.
Is this a serious question?
The entire financial industry got slapped very heavily for organizing things in secret chats after the LIBOR scandal. A lot of people regularly get training of what may and may not discuss under what channels.
No, when I am discussing military actions, I write postcards instead. But please note that I use Pig Latin for extra security.
Pig Latin with ROT13 encoding, of course!
I use Pony Express
I actually do. There is literally zero reason to not do so ... even ignoring security.
Exactly. My work-provided chat app and email automatically contains the whole company's contacts. And the messages show up on people's work devices.
If I wanted to use a personal chat or personal email, I'd need to know their personal details, or copy-paste their work info, it would confuse which accounts they reply to... it would make no sense at all.
I keep my work convos and personal convos separate not just because it's company policy, but it's 100x easier for me.
Well, I don’t always break rules, but when I do, I make sure I am not breaking laws.
Government rules are often laws. Company rules are often internal policies.
Potato, puh-treason…
It's the first line of the thirty-three dog whistle defense. The followers accept that answer as King Krasnov having simply declared that any such information isn't classified, just like he did for those boxes of files exfiltrated to his bathroom-turned-guest-library. It's the adult version of a kid going "I'm not hitting my brother I'm just swinging my arms and walking forward". And then of course if the courts actually start to disagree, the neofascists ramp up the threats for stochastic violence.
> It's the adult version of a kid going "I'm not hitting my brother I'm just swinging my arms and walking forward".
I always say that adults are kids who don't have the supervision anymore.
When a kid says "2 + 2 = 5" you can say "well you always fail your math exams, you obviously can't be trusted with that". When an adult says it... it becomes a "belief" and we "respectfully agree to disagree".
That's because we are too tired to argue.
Your comment makes me wonder if a large part of what's driving this is the proliferation of so many disparate (sub)cultures, and specifically the brain drain away from the subcultures that had been the traditional societal defaults.
When you were at school, you were both part of the same social hierarchy. On the topic of math proficiency (general smartness, really), it was easy for him to perform a mental check and see that you were above him in that aspect (even if he was above you in other aspects), and so he should listen to you.
But then you probably went your own way, essentially getting out of his way with him continuing to advance in that traditional subculture. So now he feels he's earned being considered closer to the top of the hierarchy, even though it's no longer a pan-society hierarchy!
And then he also cannot understand where to slot you into his mental model. So you just get written off as an outside attacking force to be opposed.
This also explains why they continue calling themselves "conservatives" despite gleefully working to destroy our institutions and standing in the world - what they want "conserved" is their perceived prominence of the subcultures they bought into.
You don't need to pretend. All you need is a number system that consists of the number 0,1,2,3,5,6,7,8,9,A and it's very clear that 2+2 does equal 5.
The logic is that since they are the bosses they can dictate what is classified and what is not. So something is classified until it's mishandled, at which point it's not classified, therefore it's not mishandled. lol.
I don't doubt that's their logic, but below the office of the POTUS it isn't true.
For that matter, the power of the POTUS to declassify things is part of the overall asssumed powers, not explicitly set forth in law anywhere (so far as I am aware), but increasingly supported by SCOTUS decisions.
In precise, dried-ink legal terms, if I am someone entitled to read classified information, and mark my grocery list top and bottom with the appropriate signage, that stupid list actually becomes classified. Sharing it with a friend then literally becomes a federal crime. Declassification is a specified process, involving review and approval by authorities (not me), or expiration of the classified period (a default for low levels of classification - it can of course be renewed).
Trump has maintained he has the power to declassify things with his mind alone, so I'm sure this is entirely true. Whatever they were talking about, bam, it's no longer classified.
At least they're using Signal, I guess. Can you imagine if this leaked and they were using something like Telegram!?
> Can you imagine if this leaked and they were using something like Telegram!?
That would be a lot more fun :-).
But I'm happy it's Signal: they apparently got a ton of downloads from all the attention and they deserve it.
The upside is that we now know what people with basically unrestricted access to the inner workings of the US surveillance state machine consider the most secure way to evade it.