Why a Phone isn’t a Secret Room: An Outburst from Moscow in a Super-Triple Extra-Confidential Dialogue
As for that mortifying incident in which a journalist was invited into a supposedly super-triple-extra-confidential conversation with top military and intelligence leaders, it’s hard to know what’s worse: not being aware who was in the group chat or conducting the chat on mobile phones. The participants — the intended participants, anyway — may have thought they were safe because their texts were encrypted by the Signal messaging app, prized by the secrecy-minded all over the world. The people using it are as secure as the chat people are. Just a few days ago, the Pentagon issued a warning that Russian hackers were tricking people into letting them join their Signal group texts. Steve Witkoff, a special envoy, accepted an invitation to join a chat anyway — and he did it from Moscow.
There is not a way to make a phone unhackable. In SCIFs, the secure rooms where Washington officials conduct their most sensitive conversations, phones aren’t even allowed in the door.
Source: Opinion | Foreign Spies to Team Trump: 👊🇺🇸🔥
The NSO Group and the Pentagon: How Pete Hegseth is lying about the Defense Secretary’s actions in Yemen, and what he can do about it
Zero- click software is sold to the regimes and corporations around the globe. Apple has notified users in 150 countries that they’ve been targeted. The NSO Group has developed a program that has been deployed in Saudi Arabia, Spain, Hungary, India, Mexico and Rwanda. “Now the junior varsity countries can come in and succeed,” says Frank Figliuzzi, the F.B.I.’s former assistant director for counterintelligence. “You don’t need to be very sophisticated.”
The White House continues to largely dismiss a highly sensitive discussion by leading national security officials on the open-source encrypted Signal messaging app that leaked to a reporter.
At a White House briefing Wednesday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the media “continues to be focused on a sensationalized story from the failing Atlantic magazine that is falling apart by the hour.”
The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, who was accidentally included in the Signal discussion and exposed it, published the entire text exchange Wednesday after officials minimized their actions, maintaining that nothing classified was discussed. The defense secretary and top intelligence officials in the Trump administration are included in the signal group as they discuss the ongoing military operation in Yemen. The new details about the group’s messages confirmed that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described specific weapons systems that would launch strikes in Yemen and that he announced the beginning of the operation more than an hour before the strikes hit.
“I’ve defended spillage cases where people were going to be put out of the military or people were going to be turned out of their job within the military for violations that are just the smallest fraction of what just occurred,” Carroll said.
Pete Hegseth is a liar. This is so clearly classified info he recklessly leaked that could’ve gotten our pilots killed,” Duckworth said in a news release Wednesday. “He needs to resign in disgrace immediately.”
“There would be an immediate investigation launched,” Mulroy told NPR’s Here & Now. “They’d be removed from any access to classified information, and if this is what they in fact did, they’d likely get court-martialed. I think everybody in the military knows that is the case. And unfortunately, instead of owning up to it and taking responsibility, it seems to be that they’re making excuses for every reason why they could be able to do this.”
Seeing leadership share attack plans in advance on Signal is toxic to the troops. He says that there is a phrase for it in the military: “different spanks for different ranks.”
But the leak of operational details lands a little differently with military veterans and especially with active-duty troops, who can be discharged and prosecuted for much lower-level leaks. In the case of the Signal group chat, the military calls it a “spillage”.
“What typically happens is they’re fired immediately, it’s the worst thing that could happen in a disaster,” says Kevin Carroll, who served 30 years in the Army and in the CIA and at the Department of Homeland Security. He says there’s no doubt what would have happened to an active-duty officer who had participated in the Signal chat.